The evolution of Russia's gas sector: infrastructural lock-ins, limited access institutions, domestic balance of power and rent redistribution

In 2013, the gas export monopoly of the Russian majority state-owned gas company, Gazprom, was broken. Two more companies - the majority state-owned Rosneft and private Novatek - were granted access to Russian liquified natural gas (LNG) exports. Nevertheless, despite pressure from domestic actors, Gazprom remained the sole exporter of Russian gas via pipelines. The first question that this dissertation addresses is: what explains the persistence of the single-actor model of pipeline gas exports led by Gazprom? The second question is: why did Russia break Gazprom's monopoly on LNG exports in 2013? The third question is two-fold: why did access to LNG exports opened to two NGPs only and how did the inclusion of a private Russian gas company, Novatek, in the country's gas sector organisation fit within the overall Russian political-economic environment of the 2010s? I rely on data from secondary research and ten expert interviews. I use a single case research design complemented by explaining-outcome process tracing to analyse the findings through a novel conceptual framework in a single coherent narrative.
While most of the works that look at Russia's gas strategy take the perspective of Russia's external gas consumers, I shift the viewpoint to the domestic level. I suggest that resource-rich countries are prone to creating limited access orders (LAOs), as described by North et al. (2009), namely: they create institutional environments that limit the access to rents and privileges to a dominant coalition consisting of political and economic elites. I argue that external shocks affect the relative power of the actors in a given energy or resource sector and trigger shifts in the institutions that distribute access to rent-generating activities (e.g., gas exports) to reflect the interests of those actors whose power has grown. However, I argue that changes in the distributive institutions are constrained by industry and country-specific infrastructural and technological lock-ins. These lock-ins reduce the incentives for reforms and, thus, perpetuate some aspects of the industrial organisation over time.
This causal logic was confirmed by the empirical findings. I showed that the inclusion of other actors besides Gazprom in Russia's gas export strategy was a result of a readjustment in the distributive institutions of access to gas export rents generation that reflected a decrease in the relative bargaining power of Gazprom and an increase of that of Rosneft and Novatek. I demonstrate that these institutional adjustments affected only areas outside the sector's infrastructural lock-ins, namely: the LNG that was not physically constrained by the single domestic and export gas pipeline supply channel created during the initial development of the gas sector. Furthermore, access to gas exports remained limited, as members of Rosneft's and Novatek's higher management were associated with the ruling elite. Above all, I argued that the inclusion of a private company did not fundamentally change the rules of gas export rent redistribution to domestically: once the private Novatek gained access to gas exports, indications emerged suggesting that it was required to also participate in the domestic redistribution of rents in a similar way in which a state-owned company, such as Gazprom would, i.e., taking up socio-economic roles, such as supplying insolvent domestic consumers.