Natural gas pipeline politics in and around the European Union Modelling – based assessment of Russian and European strategies [védés előtt]

In the last 20 years, the growing reliance of the EU on gas imports increased the vulnerability of the energy system to supply shocks. Natural gas is difficult to substitute in the short term due to the high share of gas in space heating and electricity generation in most of the EU Member States. Russia has been supplying gas to the EU since the 1970s and reached a 35% market share by 2020. There has always been some cautiousness with ’red gas’ during the Sovjet era, but trust in Russian gas supplies was first time seriously questioned by Western European policymakers in January 2009. At that time transit via Ukraine was halted for two weeks because of a dispute over gas transit between Russia and Ukraine. Since that time the EU and Russia developed parallel strategies to mitigate this transit risk. This dissertation focuses on the power politics surrounding the natural gas pipeline projects planned and implemented between 2009-2020 with a special focus on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which became a symbolic project of power politics. The dissertation applies an interdisciplinary approach and uses geopolitical, legal and economic arguments to explain the pipeline strategies and their implementation. In the analytical chapters, the main analytical tool is gas market modelling to compare different pipeline and policy options from the European welfare and the Russian profit point of view. The dissertation aims to answer the following questions: Question 1.: How would Russian Gazprom use the Ukrainian infrastructure under different combinations of availability of the new routes, if it were a profit-maximizing actor? Question 2.: How successful was the EU’s pipeline strategy in infrastructure planning, in selecting and implementing the right projects of common interests between 2013-2020 to improve the resilience of the EU gas markets to supply shocks and growing market power of upstream supplies? Question 3.: How did the European and the Russian pipeline strategies influence each other under a worsening geopolitical ...