The EU is getting further from its goal of weaning off Russian fossil fuels by 2027. Imports of Russian gas rose by 18 percent last year, a new analysis finds.
“It is a scandal that the EU is still importing Russian gas,” said Pawel Czyzak, an analyst at energy think tank Ember and lead author of the new report.
The spike in imports comes despite the fact that demand for gas stayed flat, according to the report. While the EU is aiming to disentangle itself from Russia, it still lacks a legally binding target or a plan to wean off fossil fuel impor
18 Comments
YaleE360
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oldpersonintx
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OgsyedIE
The sanctions regime was remarked on as poorly-thought out as early as Q3 2022 IIRC. Even though it's a Doomberg talking point, it remains true that the only way to really crush Russian market share in the European energy mix is to crowd them out with greater output volumes of competition from other gas exporters.
GardenLetter27
To be fair, as a Europoor, I like having electricity.
Europe really should have invested in fracking and nuclear power so this would never have been needed, but the Putin-funded "environmentalists" and degrowthers put a stop to that.
seydor
EU has gas reserves that it does not want to exploit. It's as if it's waiting for something …
braiamp
This article is missing the point. If the price of energy is below the cost for Russia, the sanctions are working. The sanctions is that they will not pay market price for that energy.
simfoo
No wonder, seeing how conservative and right-leaning parties are doing everything in their power to delay renewables wherever they can. In Germany new power distribution infrastructure keeps being delayed despite desperate need (at times most wind turbines and solar farms are shut down remotely because the power cannot be transported to consumers) and they managed to slow down deployment of heat pumps to bring down gas usage used for heating.
Recent estimates reckon that last years conservative campaign against heat pumps led to a rocking 24 billion € extra spending on gas (https://www.focus.de/earth/energie/auf-kosten-der-verbrauche…)
ramesh31
We thought modern industrialized nations could never go to total war again because people simply wouldn't accept it. Turns out they did.
adolph
"Despite?" I thought the EU payments to Russia were propping up the war.
On the other hand, hydrocarbons are a global commodity. If EU bought from somewhere else, then Russian methane would just substitute for whoever would have bought from that somewhere else. Buying from somewhere else just increases costs through use of less efficient transportation than whatever pipelines remain.
And on that same other hand, hydrocarbon extraction isn't free revenue for the Russian state. Unless Russia is willing to go the way of Venezuela and starve its golden goose, the total free revenue is probably something similar to the profit margin of an oil company[0], which is pretty volatile. If an average margin is 20%, EU's 21.9B of fuel purchases is more like 2.4B of Russian govt support compared to 18.7B to Ukraine.
0. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012015/what-average…
fadedsignal
It's not a surprise. There are certain players in the gas market. Don't forget that governments work for corporations, not for people. Corporations want the cheapest of the cheapest for their profits, and politicians want more cuts. Whoever offers the cheapest good (gas in this case) will eventually get sold. Even though they tell people that the EU is putting sanctions on Russia, their puppet (Greece) carries Russian gas to the EU. This is how the world works.
anovikov
This isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. Ukraine gas transit has ended so this year, the numbers will go down again to new historic low.
Vast majority of what's left is LNG, which is rather hard to shut off because it's easy to conceal it's origin, but for the same reason, it's not a source of any danger to Europe: Putin can't shut it off from his side, either – because the stream is managed by international traders so there is no way he could say "no selling it to Europeans". Goal of getting rid of Russian energy was to limit political influence/blackmail potential and LNG imports are safe from that.
Apart from LNG, there is Turkstream. It provides little and will be shut down by 2027. There is very little friction about it.
throweu
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1970-01-01
Europe's future is building more (solar and nuclear) or (gas and coal). Solar scales very quickly. Nuclear very slowly. Have both or suffer the fate that gas and coal brings. Politics does a fantastic job of messing simple ideas; it's really that simple to understand this energy crisis.
Symbiote
Official statistics are here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php…
Imports from Russia dropped from just over €60bn in 2022 to around €10bn in 2023, but decreased very little since then.
lovegrenoble
As a continent, I think Europe was reduced to zero when the US;
– Dragged you into its proxy war with your largest energy supplier,
– Blew up the largest pipeline supplying said energy just so you couldn't turn it on again even if you wanted to,
– stole all your businesses that fled to the US because of high energy costs,
– Forced you to buy expensive American oil and gas
Amusingly, the thing that will convince me that Europe is looking out for its own interests again, is if they try to restore relations with Russia, their most natural supplier of materials and energy. But they're too lost in their own infantile hubris to see it.
yalogin
Why does this post from a university read like a political hit job? I would expect such a low effort post from a media entity looking for clicks not Yale.
It does provide a critical piece of information that they are using shadow vessels to hide the purchase.
However, they don't go into historic numbers and if they really are trying to build any alternatives to Russian gas or not. Building something to replace as critical an asset as gas takes time. It would have benefitted everyone (the readers) if they dug into that a bit more
rdtsc
> Despite Ukraine War
A war that started in 2014. They watched Putin annex Crimea then proceed to built stronger ties with him.
It's also worth pointing out that countries like Germany had a hand in making sure Ukraine won't make it to NATO. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Bucharest_summit
> The Alliance did not offer a Membership Action Plan to Georgia or Ukraine, largely due to the opposition of Germany
Moreover, US govt urged them not to do it but they did it anyway: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trump-scolded-germany-for…
So it's not really that they had "only 2-3 years", they had more then a decade to sever ties and strengthen their military. But they did they opposite.
At the same time, the realpolitik take is this all not too inconvenient for Europe. Give Ukranians some loans, send a few tanks, hug and kiss Zelensky in photo-ops when he visits. Let them keep Russian busy and grinding them down. It's not their soldiers after all, it's Ukrainians. If Ukranians lose they can go "oh well, too bad" and then keep buying Russian gas and oil.
graemep
The EU, not Europe. Europe includes the UK, Norway, Switzerland etc. Most of Russia's population too.