The RF Ministry of Energy performs a strategic retreat.
The energy plans are becoming modest and liberal.
Tomorrow at a meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev the draft energy strategy of the Russian Federation until 2035 will be discussed. "The Kommersant" knows its main parameters. Compared with the first version dated 2014 the document has changed dramatically. Now the Ministry of Energy is awaiting a 2% decrease in oil production in the country by 2020 with the risk of 10% reduction by 2035. Forecasts of gas production have become more modest by reducing the prospects for LNG projects, the officials are ready to allow independent producers to export, while maintaining a single sales channel in the face of "Gazprom". In general, the project looks like a combination of a list of hung regulatory issues and figures whose credibility is questionable.
Russian energy strategy until 2035, the project of which "the Kommersant" has managed to come across, was planned to be adopted in early 2014. But the document had radically been redesigned under the effects of Western sanctions, economic slowdown and lower oil prices. Now the RF Ministry of Energy is preparing a draft, even the target scenario expects a decrease in oil production in Russia by 11 million tons to 514 million tons in 2020. As a result, the central element of the oil strategy was the introduction of a tax on financial results (NFR): the materials state that the changes in taxation manage whether the production will recover to the level of 2014 (525 million tons) by 2035, or fall to 476 million tons. In the autumn the RF Ministry of Energy was actively promoting the idea of introducing NFR in the fight against the RF Ministry of Finance (see. "the Kommersant" on March 16), but at the end of February such a sharp drop in production was formally out of the question: the Minister, Alexander Novak claimed that it will remain at the current level until 2035. The RF Ministry of Energy declined to comment yesterday, but according to a source of "the Kommersant" the indicators of energy strategy "will still change."
