Russia expects the fellow BRICS nations Brazil, China, India and South Africa to finalize the formation of their national expert groups for the BRICS Energy Research Platform by the end of the year, so that the new entity could present priority areas for cooperation in 2020, Russian Deputy Energy Minister Anton Inyutsyn told Sputnik
BRASILIA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th November, 2019) Russia expects the fellow BRICS nations Brazil, China, India and South Africa to finalize the formation of their national expert groups for the BRICS Energy Research Platform by the end of the year, so that the new entity could present priority areas for cooperation in 2020, Russian Deputy Energy Minister Anton Inyutsyn told Sputnik.Russia put forward the initiative of creating an energy research platform back in 2017 to bring together BRICS experts in the energy sector to share their forecasts and conduct joint assessments of international energy markets. The work to implement this idea started this year.
According to Inyutsyn, BRICS nations have good bilateral energy cooperation, while developing the BRICS Energy Research Platform is considered to be a "key goal" to boost multilateral cooperation.
"Today, we have managed to adopt the platform's rules of procedure. We expect our partners to complete the formation of their national expert groups by the year's end. Russia has already carried out this work and teamed up 40 experts from various areas, including the representatives of companies, research institutions and agencies," Inyutsyn said on the sidelines of the 4th BRICS energy ministers meeting, which the Sputnik news agency is exclusively covering.
As Russia is set take over the presidency of the association the following year, it hopes that the BRICS Energy Research Platform will be ready for the presentation as entity by the end of 2020, the deputy minister stressed.
"We have outlined several topics of interest to our partners. It includes natural gas and green energy. The latter issue is especially important in our view in terms of technological cooperation on reducing the dependence on energy equipment imports. As of today, every BRICS country to a certain extent relies on technologies which it has to buy [from abroad] to develop its energy sector. So, it would be interesting and useful to outline the scope of technologies that we could localize in our countries," Inyutsyn said.
The potential projects of the BRICS Energy Research Platform could be financed by the BRICS Development Bank, the deputy minister noted.
