All you need to know about Russian gas politics

Well, most of it anyway. There is an excellent article by Pepe Escobar at the Asia Times on Russia and the leverage it has in its foreign relations given its enormous gas reserves. It's a lot to digest, but worth understanding, because it will help you understand why Russia does a lot of what it does. Here's an excerpt:

Whatever the results of the EU-Russia summit this Thursday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, there seems to be one clear winner: the Gazprom nation - Russia.

With the United States - the European Union's No 1 trade partner and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally - mired in the Iraq quagmire and the EU with an ongoing constitutional crisis, Russia is exceptionally positioned to have its way in the negotiations leading to the post-2007 "Strategic Partnership Treaty" between the EU and Russia.
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Natural gas, "blue gold" in industry lingo, has become, in an emerging multipolar world, the prime source of intractable conflict and a formidable political and diplomatic weapon in the hands of such states as Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia.

Gas, unlike oil, complies with the constraints on carbon emissions defined by the Kyoto Protocol. It is even more abundant than oil; proven reserves, with existing technology, may last as many as 70 years, compared with 40 or so for oil. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), gas will be consumed in a faster progression (2.3% annually) than oil (1.6%), carbon (1.5%) or nuclear power (0.4%).

But there's a catch: for this to happen, says the IEA, the industry would need global investments totaling at least US$100 billion a year.

Before the January Russian-Ukrainian crisis, there had not been a geopolitical gas war. Now we've entered the era of pipeline power, where geopolitical turmoil is intimately linked to gas-pipeline routes, as in the Northern European Gas Pipeline, the Russian-German project under the Baltic Sea (bypassing Baltic states and Poland); the pipeline from Siberia prioritizing either China or Japan; and the pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina via Brazil, bypassing Bolivia.

Geopolitical turmoil is also linked to pipeline routes in the making, as in the Arctic, which pits the US against Canada, Russia against Norway (in the Barents Sea) and Denmark (in Greenland) against Canada. According to the US Geological Survey, 25% of the world's gas reserves still to be discovered lie in the Arctic.