Russia's status as an "energy superpower", which Russian officials have touted for decades, will be lost in the coming years.
Having lost access to Western technology and deprived of key markets for raw materials, Russia will no longer be able to return to previous volumes of hydrocarbon exports either in physical or monetary terms, experts from the Energy Research Institute predict of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IEI RAN).
According to their estimates, over the next 25 years, the economy will lose 40% of fuel exports, and revenues from it will decrease 2.8 times.
If in 2021 Russia exported 821 million tons of oil, coal and gas in the amount of 821 million tons of fuel equivalent, then by 2030 total exports will drop to 583 million tons, by 2040. - up to 561 million tons, and by 2050 - up to 486 million tons.
Foreign exchange earnings from hydrocarbon exports, which for decades have been used to import technology and consumer goods, will shrink from $315 billion in pre-war 2021 to $146 billion by 2030. And in 2050 they will be only 114 billion dollars.
The export of oil and oil products, according to the forecast of the RAS, by the middle of the 21st century will be a quarter lower than before the war (167 million tons per year against 217 million), and the income from it will decrease 3.4 times - from $238.2 billion to $70.8 billion. Gas exports, which collapsed to 1985 levels after "Gazprom" lost the European market, will recover to 193 billion cubic meters per year, but will remain a quarter lower than before the war (259 billion cubic meters). Gas revenues for the economy will decrease by 43%, from $76.3 billion to $43.3 billion annually.
Coal exports, according to the RAS forecast, will collapse more than 10 times in 25 years - from 208 to 20 million tons per year.
Obtaining income from the export of fuels, mainly oil, oil products and gas, is one of the main factors for the recovery of the Russian economy, experts from the Institute of Economic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences wrote in an article published by the journal "Prognozny" problems": in the 1990s, the raw materials industry fell sharply along with the economy, but in 2003 the tonnage of hydrocarbons exported abroad returned to the levels of the end of the USSR. The subsequent surge in oil and gas prices bought up the economy in currency and created the "economic miracle" of Vladimir Putin's first term.
At the end of 2010, hydrocarbon exports abroad accounted for up to a third of Russia's GDP. But in the coming decades, the fuel and energy sector will "lose its former role as a "locomotive" of the Russian economy" and its contribution to GDP will decrease fivefold, the article says.
"With the special military operation, Russia radically changed its foreign policy - initiated and actually led the movement to return to a multipolar world. But the country's already slow economic development is exacerbated by unprecedented sanctions (including those that sharply reduced export earnings), which calls into question the ability to fulfill these functions, experts warn.
translation: Nick Iliev