In the inner sanctums of the Arctic Circle, where temperatures can drop to as low as negative 60 degrees centigrade during winters that can last for as long as nine months a year, live the Nenet indigenous people, who call the vast Yamal Peninsula home.

In their language, the word ‘Yamal’ literally means “where the land ends”. “Relatively few people in the world have crossed into the Arctic Circle,” says Dmitry

Shchyogolev, the director-general of Gazprom Dobycha Nadim, one of the wholly-owned subsidiaries of Gazprom, the Russian oil and gas conglomerate that has started making forays into the energy sector in Africa.

Here, where the land literally ends, is also where the story of Russian natural gas begins.
According to Shchyogolev, this expanse spanning over 122,000 square kilometres has over 20 trillion cubic meters of natural gas underneath the relatively flat lands that stretch in the four directions of the wind.

This region has more energy than all of Russia and its neighbours will need in the foreseeable future. Indeed, about 1,700 metres below the surface is to be found enough natural gas to last 100 years.

Gazprom has been extracting that gas for decades now, using it to warm the houses of its citizens in winter and for cooking. But natural gas, one of the cleanest sources of energy in the world today, can also be used directly in big factories to fire ovens or drive machinery or in power plants to produce electricity.
It is also used to produce the electricity used by trams, underground trains and other forms of public transport. In addition, hydrogen, one of its by-products, is used to make fertiliser. That is why Russia is a net exporter of fertiliser, including to Kenya, where tea farmers use it to ramp up production.

One of the major gas fields is to be found in the Bovanenkovo region in Yamal Peninsula. It is known in Russia as the Bovanenkovskoye field. Here, an intricate system of steel pipes connects the gas wells to the processing chambers, where it is purified by removing water, unwanted gases and other impurities in various identical stations manned by small teams of highly trained engineers and other professionals.

“All the materials we use in the plants are made in Russia by Russian companies,” said Shchyogolev, a fact repeated by numerous Gazprom officers in different parts of the country and borne out by their suppliers, some of who are independent private companies and others subsidiaries of Gazprom. “I have no idea how much steel we have used but it is a lot.”

This is an important piece of information because in Africa, countries like Mozambique,
which have been selling natural gas to South Africa for 16 years now, use equipment bought from different countries, including China. And since the civil war there ended in 1992, the country is yet to take any steps to train its own citizens on gas extraction and exploitation or to make byproducts like fertiliser.
Gas extraction and distribution is a capital-intensive venture. Russia, for instance, has over 7,000 kilometres of gas pipes laid out across the country, ensuring a stable supply for domestic and industrial consumption as well as for export, initially to Europe before the Russia-Ukraine war and now to China, its frontier market.

Field captains
Still, it keeps investing in new wells, particularly in the gas rich Tundra region where there is little human activity and where the investments have zero to minimal impact on the environment.
The one big challenge the country must contend with is the permafrost in that region, which has millions of cubic metres of natural gas that remains untapped. Always innovating, however, its engineers have found piping material that defies the perennial cold.

“We have never had corrosion, so it is not a problem for us,” said one of the site lead managers, known as field captains in the Gazprom hierarchy.

In each pumping station is to be found a turbine the equivalent of an aircraft engine, which is designed to pump the gas at high pressure without taking off into the skies itself.

Designed and built by JSC Nevsky Zavod, a private company based in the outskirts of St Petersburg, the turbine that can weigh as much as 20 tonnes is, in a sense, an aircraft engine designed to work on the ground. In the complex system that is the Russian supply network, there is one to be found every 300 kilometres. And it takes experts all of nine months from design to shipping of each turbine.

Every hour, each of these turbines pumps hundreds of thousands of litres of natural gas into the national collective gas pipeline for onward distribution or for storage in massive underground tanks located strategically in various parts of the country.

If this gas finds its way to the Pervomaiskaya electricity generating plant, also on the outskirts of St Petersburg, it is converted into electricity, which is among other things, used to power trams, underground trains and other public electrified forms of transport.

In other stations, the gas is loaded onto trucks under highly controlled conditions and supplied to various gas stations in St Petersburg for use by buses, trucks, taxis and private vehicles that either use gas exclusively, or have the capacity to use either gas or diesel.

A cubic metre of gas, which costs half the price of diesel, can sustain a taxi for 500km in city driving conditions. By December last year, Russia had over 720 gas stations along major highways, a number that has increased to close to 800 by June. And more are being set up.

This is what makes public transport affordable and convenient, compared to countries like Kenya, which rely largely on diesel for commercial road and railway transport and petrol for private vehicles.
Gas in Russia is also be used in homes for cooking and heating, of course, and in industries, such as ship building, which require to heat metals at high temperatures.

“The new gas production centres are key to the development of the Russian gas industry in the 21 st century,” the company said in its briefing to journalists representing various African countries – all of them with potential for either gas, coal or other natural forms of energy that have the capacity to meet the energy needs of the continent and transform its economic fortunes through production of natural gas for local use and export as is already happening in Tanzania, Egypt, Algeria and Mozambique.
“If you have hydrocarbons, Gazprom can help you develop gas (infrastructure),” said Dimitry Stratov, one of the senior managers at the State-owned company, which is also one of the most profitable energy ventures in Europe.
Indeed, countries like Mozambique have been exploiting their natural gas, selling it to energy-starved South Africa next door for the last 16 years and with potential still growing.
The only challenge remains that Mozambique negotiated its contract at a time when it was emerging from decades of civil war. As such, it failed to strike a good deal, meaning that it has not earned the full dividends of the contract, such as in job creation or better income. Still, private players in that country continue to invest in the energy sector, not just for local consumption but also for export.

Piped gas
“My goal is to become the leading private supplier of gas and electricity in Africa by 2040,” says Michel Ussene, executive chairman of Mitra Energy, a Mozambique-based energy supply chain company that has footprints in 14 African countries and that is already exploring possibilities of setting up shop in Kenya to supply power and fuel.
Mozambique is not alone in that ecosystem. Countries like Egypt have already started taking advantage of their immense natural gas reserves for the benefit of ordinary citizens. Ahmed Mamdouh, who lives in Haram, a suburb in Cairo, Egypt’s capital, told the People Daily that he no longer drives to a petrol station to buy Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG), a common practice in Kenya. “Gas is now piped to our apartment,” he says.
Just as other domestic consumers in Russia do, Mamdouh has a meter in his apartment, and he is charged monthly per usage. “I pay about three dollars a month,” he says, “and I cook a lot.”

Series to be continued tomorrow.