Despite the fact that the gas pipeline that connects Russia with Germany through the bed of the Baltic Sea returned to work last Thursday – at 40 percent of the capacity with which it has been operating for two months – after the repair of a turbine, the Europeans fear that at any moment the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, will turn off the gas tap.
After cutting supplies to some countries for refusing to pay contracts in rubles (France, Poland, Bulgaria, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands) and limiting the volume of shipments to others (Germany and Italy), Moscow began its most worrying move: closing for maintenance work on the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, the most important for the European Union (EU).
(Also read: Europe’s plan in the face of the possibility that Russia will cut off its gas in winter)
Under normal circumstances, the routine shutdown would not be a problem. However, with the war in Ukraine as a backdrop, the coming winter seems to be looming as the opportunity Putin is going to have to use Europe’s dependence on Russian gas as a geopolitical weapon.
Prior to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian gas accounted for 40% of European imports of this hydrocarbon. That rate is now around 25 percent, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find alternative suppliers that can supply it when Europe consumes some 425,000 million cubic meters of gas a year, being the world’s largest consumer.
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Faced with the risk of a winter without heating and with the industry stopped, the European Commission (EC) presented this week a savings plan to reduce consumption by 15% between August 1 and March 31, 2023. For now, saving will be voluntary and will only become mandatory if governments are far from meeting it.
And while the energy ministers of the 27 EU member states will meet next Tuesday in Brussels to approve it, doubts are growing because several countries have already rejected it.
Spain, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Greece allege that linear and equal savings for all do not make sense when they either have full reserves (in the Polish case) or do not have supply problems because either their purchases from Russia are minimal or They have alternative providers.
For their part, Germany and the Netherlands criticized the fact that the EC can decide on its own to declare a kind of state of energy emergency at a continental level for which it has no support in the European treaties.
A report by Bruegel, a center for economic studies in Brussels, considers the figure of 15% savings to be good, but as an average. The study points out that while Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania must reduce their gas demand by 54 percent; in the German case it would be 29 percent; Denmark and Sweden, 21 percent; Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, 16 percent; Italy, 9 percent; and Spain, France and Portugal would not need to reduce it.
However, the only exception allowed by the EC plan is that countries that cannot send more energy to their neighbors due to lack of connections (gas pipelines or power lines) reduce their demand by 10 percent instead of 15.
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Spain’s complaint
The Spanish case is paradigmatic, which is why in Brussels its diplomacy raised its voice against the plan.
Spain insists that it only has one gas pipeline connecting it to France and a single high-voltage power line. The two tracks work at their maximum capacity to help the Gallic country, which has half of its nuclear reactors turned off.
The Spaniards traditionally hardly bought Russian gas, but to avoid the problem of having a single gas pipeline supplier (Algeria), they have invested 3,500 million euros in recent years to have six regasification plants (40% of the European ones) that would allow the arrival of large methane tankers with gas from Norway, the United States United States, the Persian Gulf or Nigeria.
Spain, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Greece allege that linear and equal savings for all make no sense
While countries like Germany, Austria or Slovakia put all their eggs in the basket of Russian gas, which for decades was cheap but which led them to an absolute dependency from which they now have no means to let go, the Spanish allege that even accepting the Brussels plan and saving 10 or 15% of gas, they have no way of sending it to the rest of Europe.
And it is that the German problem is more serious than the savings percentages that Bruegel’s report marks. Its industry has functioned successfully for decades thanks to cheap Russian gas, so it is estimated that its demand should fall by 40 percent if Moscow closes all the taps. This added to the fact that the countries with the highest gas consumption, in part because they invested less in renewable energies, are in a worse situation.
(Keep reading: What is Nord Stream, the Russian gas pipeline that keeps Europe on edge?)
According to data from the company Enerdata, while in 2021 Spain consumed 723 cubic meters of gas per capita, the Netherlands registered 2,333, up to three times more gas than the Spanish.
This is because while 47.1% of Spanish electricity is generated by renewable sources, this rate falls to 32% in the Netherlands. And because gas was so cheap for so long, that with their North Sea climate the Dutch have a vast fruit and vegetable production just like a Mediterranean country, built on the basis of creating heated greenhouses, something considered an energy aberration.
The implementation of renewables can also be seen in the data on CO2 emissions per person. The Dutch and the Poles emit 8.1 tons of CO2 per person per year, the Germans 7.9, the Italians 5.0 and the French and Spanish 4.7.
dangerous alternatives
According to analyzes by the International Energy Agency (IEA), EU member states must fill their gas reserves to 90 percent in the coming months to be able to overcome the next winter without shortage problems.
Currently, the average fuel storage is around 65%, a figure 13 points higher than last year at this time. However, 2021 was one of the worst years for fuel reserves. This was one of the aggravating factors of a crisis that last winter caused historic records in gas and electricity prices.
(You can read: European Union adopts veto against purchases and imports of Russian gold)
Furthermore, filling the tanks on time could prove a huge challenge if Gazprom, Russia’s largest gas company, continues to reduce the flow of hydrocarbons to the EU.
Faced with the difficult panorama, Europe is looking for alternative suppliers. The problem is that, with the exception of the US and Norway, which do not have much more export capacity, the other major gas producers and exporters are authoritarian regimes: Algeria, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Azerbaijan.
The president of the Commission, Úrsula Von der Leyen, traveled earlier this week to Baku, the Azeri capital, to sign a memorandum with President Ilham Aliyev by which Azerbaijan will double its gas exports to Europe from 2023.
Aliyev, who is not exactly a model of democratic virtues, promised to go from 8,100 million cubic meters a year to 20,000 million. Although it is a tiny figure in relation to European consumption (about 400,000 million cubic meters per year), it all adds up.
However, Azerbaijan plays both sides, as it promises to expand gas exports to Europe while remaining a strategic partner of Russia.
At the same time, France negotiated an agreement with the UAE that includes not only “identifying joint projects in the field of hydrogen, renewable energy and nuclear energy”, but also the purchase of French weapons, despite the fact that reports from NGOs such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International give account of serious human rights violations in both cases.
Thus, Putin’s greatest hope is that, given the lack of European consensus and with a foreseeable spike in electricity and gas prices as winter approaches, the European bloc changes its mind and seeks to resolve the conflict At whatever price.
IDAFE MARTIN PEREZ
FOR THE TIME
BRUSSELS
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