“Diversification” is nonsense---internal documents prove.

There is a simple explanation for the apparent reluctance of Russian policy-makers to prepare for a world in which demand for hydrocarbons either plateaus or declines: they simply do not believe that there is a significant chance of this taking place, at least not in the next few decades. This should not have surprised observers. Russia's most recent draft energy strategy, published in 2014, stressed the need to expand hydrocarbon production and Russia's exports to rapidly-growing non-Western markets with the aim of maintaining Russia's position as one of the world's top-three hydrocarbon exporting countries [78].27 According to the draft strategy, the main threat to Russia will come not from a decline in demand, but instead from greater competition from other suppliers, most notably the US [85]. What is needed to deal with this competition, according to the authors, is to diversify the customer base for Russian hydrocarbon exports, and, more specifically, to expand deliveries to rapidly-growing Asian economies. As the document states, expanding exports will require developing new deposits in Russia, primarily in the Arctic – both off-shore and on-shore – and in Russia's Far East. This corresponds with another oft-stated objective of the Russian government: to develop the Arctic. For Russian officials, climate change and the shrinking of polar ice offers the opportunity to extract more natural resources and to utilise the Northern Sea Route (NSR), both as a transit route in its own right, and to facilitate the more intensive exploitation of the Arctic [86].

It is clear from reading the full range of official strategic planning documents – from those dealing with energy and the Arctic to those dealing with national security and naval strategy – that Russian officials envisage an intensification of competition over natural resources in the years ahead [87]. As a result, it is imperative that Russia exploits its resource base to both survive and thrive in a world that is likely to be characterised by resource scarcity, not abundance. This demonstrates that the reason that policy-makers in Russia do not see the urgency in moving away from hydrocarbons is because they perceive the changing global energy landscape in a very different way to many analysts from elsewhere in the world.