A chilling question – who will Putin leave out in the cold?

There is an elegant if chilling theory about the future and it goes like this. Russia is not just awash with oil and gas. It is using its energy wealth to promote its superpower ambitions through bullying and bribery. But what happens if Russia is not an energy bully, but a beggar?

The Russian government itself thinks it will be short of 4.2 billion cubic metres (bcm) next year - enough to fuel a couple of small countres. New researc€1 by Alan Riley, a lawyer specialising in energy markets, argues that Russia’s "gas deficit" - the difference between what it produces and what it needs to satisfy foreign and domestic producers - will be an annual 126bcm by 2010 (just for comparison, its annual exports to the European Union are 150bcm). Vladimir Milov, a gutsy former energy minister who runs one of the rare independent think-tanks in Moscow, agrees.

At first sight it seems preposterous. Russia’s reserves are 47 trillion cubic metres. Like so many things in Russia, the gas industry, chiefly in the form of the state-run giant Gazprom, is both wasteful and rich, and so secretive that it is hard to tell which factor is dominant.

But Russia has not developed a big new field since the collapse of the Soviet Union and those it inherited are depleting fast. Its pipes are clapped out (just over half are more than 20 years old). Its compressors are so inefficient that they waste 42bcm a year. Yet for political reasons, it is pressing ahead with "gasification" - the extension of gas supplies to private households. So demand is rising, just as supply is falling.

Secondly, its finances are murky. Much of its revenues are siphoned off by intermediary companies with anonymous beneficial owners. Costs are colossal by world standards and much money goes on activities such as yachts, property and sporting events which investment bankers primly describe as "non-core". Gazprom owns, for example, a large chain of hotels (remarkable, when your correspondent stayed in one, for the richness of the fittings, the indolence of the large staff, and the absence of guests).

In theory, Gazprom can develop new fields. But that will take years. In the case of the undersea Shtokman fields, the technical challenges are formidable. And Russia’s capricious and xenophobic investment regime is taking its toll. Foreign companies may risk a billion dollars here or there in Russia. But they are unwilling to commit the tens of billions needed to develop a new gas field.

Gazprom’s main fallback is to buy the gas from Central Asia. Leaving aside the irony of a gas-rich country struggling to import from its neighbours, there are snags here too. The quantities are huge: purchases from Turkmenistan are supposed to rise more than tenfold to 80 bcm by 2009. And the Turkmen gas industry is even worse-run than Russia’s. Independent producers inside Russia offer hope too - except that Gazprom is twitchy about allowing independents to use its pipelines. Instead, it likes to buy them; when that happens they tend to fall to Gazprom’s own woeful standards of inefficiency.

Already, Russia is cutting back supplies to soft targets such as Belarus and trying to raise gas prices wherever it can. It is not enough. A badly needed new power plant in St Petersburg is not yet running because there is no spare gas to fuel it.

If Riley is right, this winter will be fascinating, and most uncomfortable for some. Who will Vladimir Putin decide to freeze: his voters, or his neighbours? One choice risks a political explosion, the other a diplomatic one. So check your stocks of candles and coal.

• The author is central and east European correspondent of The Economist.

There is an elegant if chilling theory about the future and it goes like this. Russia is not just awash with oil and gas. It is using its energy wealth to promote its superpower ambitions through bullying and bribery. But what happens if Russia is not an energy bully, but a beggar?