China pays Russia $40-60 per 1,000 cubic metres less for pipeline gas than it pays Turkmenistan, according to an analysis of leaked Russian price data published by Carnegie Politika on October 23.
Sergey Vakulenko, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, built the analysis on a table that Russia's Economic Development Ministry accidentally included in an addendum to a socioeconomic forecast. It gave the price and volume of pipeline gas sold to China through Power of Siberia in 2022, 2023 and 2024. There are no official figures for what Beijing pays, and China's customs service stopped publishing the volumes of Russian gas imports after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The figures bear on Moscow's bargaining position as it tries to sell China more gas to replace the European market it lost to the war. Talks on the 50bn cubic metre a year Power of Siberia 2 pipeline have stalled on price, even as Moscow says China will take more than 60% of its gas exports by 2030.
The leak allowed Vakulenko to refine a pricing formula he first estimated in 2023 from Chinese customs data. The price of Russian gas per 1,000 cubic metres works out at 0.256 times the gasoil price plus 0.142 times the price of high-sulphur fuel oil, using Rotterdam quotes averaged over the previous three quarters. A simpler rule of thumb is 3.15 times the average Brent crude price over the previous three quarters. His earlier estimates came within 15% of the real prices up to spring 2026.
Turkmen gas is dearer even though it travels through an 1,800 km pipeline through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and enters China in the far west, about 3,000 km from Beijing. Russian gas crosses the border near Heihe, half that distance from the capital. The heavy weighting of gasoil in the Russian formula has worked in Moscow's favour only when diesel prices rose faster than other benchmarks, as in 2022-2023 and again in 2026.
In a hypothetical comparison over almost a quarter of a century, with prices expressed in 2026 dollars, the Power of Siberia formula would have earned Russia as much as 30% less than Gazprom's Soviet-era contracts with Western Europe. Between 2011 and 2019 it generated 18% less than the price Hungary paid for Russian gas, and during Europe's price spike from mid-2021 to mid-2023 the China price was as much as 77% lower.
Customs payment data suggest Gazprom delivered 39.4bn cubic metres to China in 2025, close to the 38.8bn cubic metres the company reported, and volumes could reach 40.5bn cubic metres in 2026 if the pace of the first seven months holds.
Vakulenko said the numbers disprove the idea that Russian negotiators accepted the terms because they expected oil prices to keep rising, since China's deal would have stayed cheaper even at high oil prices. The Power of Siberia contract was signed in May 2014, when Russia was far less isolated than now, while Gazprom today has large Yamal reserves ready to produce and no other buyer.
"If Moscow agreed to such terms back then, why should Beijing offer better ones now when Russia is far more internationally isolated?" Vakulenko wrote, concluding that the 2014 terms are probably the best Gazprom can hope for in any new contract with China.
Gazprom shares have gained almost 16% in less than two weeks on hopes that pipeline exports to Europe could resume under a peace settlement, although European officials have rejected the idea.