The United States will do everything possible to half Russia’s oil and gas revenues by 2030, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt said in an interview with the Financial Times on Dec. 2.
“The goal of these sanctions is to change Russia’s behavior and ensure that Putin, when a certain peace is reached, does not take three to four years to rearm and prepare his army for a third stage of invasion into Ukraine,” said Pyatt.
Currently, Russia continues to export significant volumes of oil. The International Energy Agency forecasts that this export could decline by at least 40-50% by 2030 if Western sanctions against Russian energy persist.
The G7 countries have imposed a ceiling price on the export of Russian oil. Non-G7 countries may continue to buy Russian crude oil but must pay less than $60 per barrel if they want to use Western ships for transportation or avail services from insurers.
The import of Russian oil into the EU, the United States, and other G7 countries is mostly prohibited. Although initially these measures led to a sharp drop in prices for Russian oil, later the Kremlin created a new network of traders and vessels to bypass these restrictions, allowing the sale of oil to buyers, primarily in India and China, at prices higher than the set ceiling, the Financial Times said.
A significant portion of this oil is transported by a “shadow fleet,” whose opaque ownership is challenging to restrict with sanctions. Pyatt assured that the United States is currently exploring “ways to make this shadow fleet less effective.”
