The stress test had definitely shown that “we still need additional infrastructure, but not everywhere – we really need to target investment where it's really needed and have the projects of common interest (“PCI's”) and how Europe promotes investments should really be targeted to regions where we do need investments.”

The biggest increase was seen in the consumption of gas-to-power by industrial customers, which increased by 161% to reach a total of 10.8% of overall consumption. The transmission operator attributes the increase in industrial demand to "favourable economic conditions."

"Just because I’ve built a pipeline, that doesn't mean that you have to buy my gas, the idea that that somehow it's undermining diversification of sources is just not true."

Nord Stream 2 will be built, according to Gazprom’s chairman of the board, Viktor Zubkov. “This means that customers will receive gas at favorable prices, but for this we need reliable sources of supply and uninterrupted means of transportation,” he said.

Nord Stream-2 project would develop rapidly in 2016. The pipeline extension project continues to move ahead, despite opposition to from several European countries

Russia's Gazprom and a group of European companies agreed on the project last year, raising protests mostly among central and southern European countries.

“The advent of [more sellers of] LNG is another challenge of the gas market,” Adeli said and noted that the U.S. has utilised modern technologies to produce gas from shale, so that the country has been turned from a gas importer to an exporter. Australia, another OECD country with no interest in joining organisations that could be seen as cartels, is already an LNG exporter and its output is rising sharply over the coming few years.

“Given the volumes of gas shipped to Europe, the marginal cost of additional Russian gas is low and they should be able to compete with US LNG supplies,” said Malcolm Johnson, a Guildford, England-based faculty member of The Oxford Princeton Programme, an energy training provider. “However, it is clear that in certain countries there is a desire to diversify supplies for supply security.”

Mr. Novak said that the project could still be implemented if the European Commission develops corresponding infrastructure for natural gas transportation in Central and Eastern Europe,

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.