Russian energy company Gazprom during an investment forum in St. Petersburg has moved to strengthen its global hand with a new deck of proposals.
Gazprom this week already signed memoranda with its partners in the twin Nord Stream pipeline to Germany to potentially add two new lines to the route.
The first leg of Nord Stream went into service in 2011. A year later, British energy company BP said it was considering linking the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline to British ports.
Nord Stream runs through the Black Sea to Germany and is among Gazprom's routes that avoids geopolitically sensitive territory in Ukraine. Russia meets about 20 percent of the European demand for natural gas, though more than half of those reserves have run through the Soviet-era pipeline network in Ukraine.
Europe, for its part, has looked to Azerbaijan as gas supplier as the region moves to break the Russian grip on the energy sector.
Gazprom in a flurry of arrangements brokered in St. Petersburg moved its reach into the liquefied natural gas market. LNG, which relies in part on maritime shipments, is less exposed to geopolitical risks than pipelines.
Alexei Miller, the chairman of Gazprom, discussed the potential for bilateral cooperation in the LNG sector with Egyptian Trade Minister Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour. An agreement on strategic cooperation with Royal Dutch Shell extends to the LNG sector via possible extensions to the existing LNG plant in Sakhalin in the Far East.
"The project for constructing the third process train of the LNG plant within the Sakhalin II project can make a great contribution to Gazprom's strategy for LNG production and sales as well as to reinforcing the company's stance in the Asia-Pacific markets," Miller said in a statement.
With a European economy looking to break the Russian grip on the region's energy sector, the Kremlin has shifted focus on building successful trade relations with Asia-Pacific economies.
