Crossroads Asia | Economy | Central Asia

China’s Quiet Pivot to Central Asian Gas

Putin left Beijing last week without a Power of Siberia 2 deal. The reason is partly in Turkmenistan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing on May 20 with a delegation built for a deal: five deputy prime ministers, eight Cabinet ministers, and the chiefs of Gazprom and Rosneft. He left two days later with declarations of friendship, a visa-free travel arrangement extended through 2027, and around 20 cooperation agreements. The one document everyone was watching for was not among them. There was, once again, no breakthrough on Power of Siberia 2, the 50-billion-cubic-meter pipeline Moscow has been trying to sell to Beijing for the better part of a decade.

The two sides reported a “basic understanding” on routing and little else. According to reporting on the talks, they remain split on the same three issues that have stalled the project for years: timetable, financing, and price. 

Beijing is holding out for something close to 12 to 13 cents per cubic meter, roughly what Russian industry pays at home. That is not a compromise position. It is a way of saying no while keeping the conversation polite.

To understand why China can afford to be this unhurried, it helps to look away from the Mongolian route Moscow keeps proposing and toward a project running in the opposite direction — westward, into Xinjiang, from the gas fields of Central Asia.

On April 17, in Turkmenistan’s Mary Province, former president and current Chairman of the People’s Council Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov and Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang stood in a purpose-built pavilion and, by video link, gave the order to begin drilling on the fourth phase of Galkynysh, the world’s second-largest onshore gas field. Ding was there on behalf of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with the full senior Turkmen leadership in attendance. “Our country regards China as a strategic partner,” Berdimuhamedov told the room.

Phase Four is expected to add up to 10 billion cubic meters of marketable gas a year, with the field’s seven-phase plan eventually targeting far more. Ashgabat is financing the work itself and has been careful not to say where the gas will go. That reticence is the most revealing part of the announcement, because in the current market Turkmenistan does not really have a choice. China already buys more than 80 percent of the country’s gas exports. The trans-Caspian route to Europe is a diplomatic aspiration. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI), is allegedly making its way across Afghanistan but full completion remains a distant dream.. The buyer for Galkynysh’s Phase Four is, in practice, already decided. What is being negotiated is the price of that certainty.

A Tale of 2 Pipeline Networks

Most Western coverage of Sino-Russian energy treats Power of Siberia 2 as the headline event. The 2,600-kilometer route will stretch from Yamal through Mongolia to China, with a planned 50-bcm capacity. As Anne-Sophie Corbeau, Erica Downs, and Tatiana Mitrova argued last autumn, the long-awaited September 2025 memorandum on the pipeline was heavy on political signaling. But it was conspicuously light on the things that actually commit a buyer: price formulas, take-or-pay volumes, penalties for under-offtake. Gazprom called it legally binding. The market never treated it that way, and this week’s summit confirmed why.

The more consequential story runs along a different axis. The Central Asia-China Gas Pipeline system, currently comprising of Lines A, B, and C, has a nominal capacity of 55 bcm a year, though actual deliveries run closer to 40 bcm, with Turkmenistan supplying around 35 bcm. A fourth strand, Line D, would add another 30 bcm through a shorter route crossing Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan into Xinjiang. Xi has pressed Central Asian leaders to accelerate it for years, most pointedly at the 2023 China-Central Asia summit. The Phase Four launch at Galkynysh is, in effect, the upstream half of that push.

Fully built out, the expanded network would carry up to 85 bcm westbound into Xinjiang, fed from several countries and feeding China’s West-East Pipeline grid, already the largest in Asia. For comparison, Power of Siberia 1 is rated at 38 bcm. Power of Siberia 2, if built on the terms Moscow wants, would add 50. But not before 2030, and only if Beijing decides it needs the gas.

A word of caution is warranted here. Line D is not a settled fact. Construction on the Tajik section, where it began ceremonially in 2014, has been suspended for most of the years since. As of the Galkynysh ceremony there was still no official confirmation from Beijing or Ashgabat that the pricing disputes blocking it had been resolved. That is precisely the point. China does not need Line D finished to use it as leverage. 

The Central Asian Suppliers

The Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center’s Sergey Vakulenko has estimated that Turkmenistan sells to China for roughly $50 per thousand cubic meters more than Russia earns via Power of Siberia 1. By the second quarter of 2025, the Turkmen border price had slipped below $290 per thousand cubic meters — consistent with oil linkage, and well under what Russia once extracted from European buyers.

That gap is not a quirk. It is the instrument Beijing uses to keep both Moscow and Ashgabat in a state of managed discomfort. Russian negotiators have spent years trying to win Turkmen-equivalent pricing on Power of Siberia 2, and China has refused. In 2024, the Financial Times reported, Beijing wanted a price near Russia’s subsidized domestic level and........

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