Average daily supplies of natural gas to Europe from Russian energy giant Gazprom rose nearly 23% in June from a year earlier, rebounding from post-Soviet lows last year, although they were down 8.6% from May, Reuters figures showed on Tuesday.
Exports were lower last month than the previous month, due to scheduled maintenance of the TurkStream undersea pipeline from June 6 to 9.
The calculations, based on data from European gas transport group Entsog and Gazprom’s daily reports on gas transit through Ukraine, showed that average daily exports from the pipeline fell to 81.8 million cubic meters (mcm) last month from 89.5 mcm in May, but rose from 66.8 mcm in June 2023.
Gazprom’s natural gas exports to Europe this year have totaled about 15.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) so far.
Europe was once Russia’s main export market, but now receives much less Russian gas due to the political response to the conflict in Ukraine.
Gazprom, on the other hand, has increased gas sales to China, which increased its pipeline gas imports from Russia to 22.7 billion cubic meters last year, almost 1.5 times more than the 15.4 billion cubic meters shipped in 2022.
Gazprom has not published its monthly statistics since the beginning of 2023. It did not respond to a request for comment.
Russia delivered a total of about 63.8 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe through various routes in 2022, according to Gazprom data and Reuters calculations. The volume fell further, by 55.6%, to 28.3 billion cubic meters last year.
At their peak in 2018-2019, annual flows to the region reached between 175 and 180 bcm.
