CNPC said the entire pipeline project is expected to be completed and operational by the end of 2018. Construction of the Chinese section began in June 2015, while construction of the Russian section began in September 2014.

“Gazprom has useful and precious experience in various fields of the gas industry and can provide them to the NIGC,” Shana quoted him saying.

Gazprom’s “export policy has always been balanced and adaptive,” says spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov. He argues that European customers have become more interested, not less, in Russian gas, given Europe’s own decline in production.

In 2015, Gazprom increased market share in Europe and Turkey by one percentage point, from 30.2% to 31.2%,

Russian Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev put it more bluntly, telling reporters in Brussels that blocking Nord Stream-2 would be "a shot in the foot" especially for Gazprom's European clients.

Gazprom’s activities in the Caspian Sea region and its negotiations with China show that Russia is increasingly looking for opportunities to strengthen its position in other regional energy markets, even though this is connected with high political and economic costs.

Nord Stream 2 project will be commissioned in the fourth quarter of 2019, in line with previous declarations that forecasted the new pipeline to be commissioned in 2019.

The ability of the US with its newly found export capacity mostly based on shale gas development provides gas into the global market, he explained, for which the European market can benefit as long as the prices in Europe are attractive to a US producer.

Gazprom has already spent €1.8bn on purchasing physical pipe for the first and second “strings” - or lines, of pipe to be laid under the Black Sea. Pipe, delivered by Germany’s Europipe and Russia’s United Metallurgical Company (OMK) under the first string contract, signed in January 2014, is now largely stashed on the wharves of the Bulgarian port of Varna. The fate of pipe ordered for the second string, under contracts placed in March 2014, is not known.

OMV and Gazprom are two of the shareholders in the contentious Nord Stream-2 expansion project. BASF, E.ON, ENGIE, and Shell are the four other stakeholders.