No grounds for restoring Nord Stream 2, expert says

MOSCOW, October 5. /TASS/. There are currently no grounds for restoring the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, chief energy director at the Institute of Energy and Finance Alexey Gromov believes.

"To be frank, I do not believe in any initiatives involving some kind of extension of Russian gas supplies to Europe or the restoration of any Nord Stream 2 pipeline routes," he said at a press conference. Gromov noted that despite the rationale behind the idea, Europe was unlikely to change its chosen political course.

"So, I don’t think we should harbor any illusions. Russian gas has left Europe, and I see no grounds for its return. Yes, Europe will pay for this, and it is already paying an increasingly high price," the expert added.

Vyacheslav Kulagin, director of the Center for Oil and Gas Research at the Institute for Economics and Regulation of Infrastructure Industries at HSE University, believes, for his part, that if tensions in Europe’s gas market increase, politicians in the region will raise the issue of returning to Russian gas.

On September 26, 2022, a terrorist attack was carried out on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, leaving only one of the system’s four pipelines intact - a string of Nord Stream 2. The 1,224-km Nord Stream gas pipeline runs along the bottom of the Baltic Sea from Vyborg in Russia to Greifswald in Germany and has a capacity of 55 bln cubic meters per year. Construction of Nord Stream 2, which has the same capacity, was completed on September 10, 2021, but the pipeline was never commissioned. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office initiated a criminal case over an act of international terrorism.