How Europe Plans to Reduce Its Dependency on Russian Gas

The European Commission has announced a new energy security strategy, and one of their clear concerns is to reduce European countries’ dependency on gas imported from Russia.

In light of the Ukraine crisis, Europe’s getting edgy over gas supplies, and with good reason: Russia has threatened to cut off gas supplies to Ukraine unless the country makes up back payments and pays in advance for gas supplies next month. Earlier this week, the European Commission said “substantial progress” had been made in negotiations between the two countries, with further talks scheduled for Friday.

But it’s not just an issue for Ukraine; major pipes that supply a lot of other European countries with Russian gas imports go through the country, which raises concerns of potential broader disruption, and serves as a reminder as to why it might not be a good idea to rely on any one source of energy imports all too much.

It’s easy to see the problem: Russia simply has a lot more natural gas and oil reserves than most of Europe, which means it’s a huge supplier to other countries. In an explainer on the new energy security proposals, the Commission reported that according to 2013 figures, a third of European oil imports and 39 percent of gas imports came from Russia, with Finland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania relying on Russia for their entire gas supply.

It noted that gas is of greater concern to energy security because of the pipeline system: while 90 percent of oil is transported by sea, leaving the option of alternative routes, gas relies on existing pipelines. You can get an idea of that from this map of pipes through Ukraine produced by AFP, which shows that 66 percent of Russian gas exported to the EU travels through Ukraine.

The Commission writes of the general gas supply situation, “Several EU Member States depend from a main supplier with limited or no possibilities to receive alternative supplies. This is the case in the Baltic region and in several countries in Eastern Europe.” That’s why one of the key points it proposes in its report is to “Discuss with industry and Member States how to diversify crude oil supplies to EU refineries to reduce dependency on Russia.”

To address the issue of energy security, European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said Europe needs to “complete the internal energy market, improve our infrastructure, become more energy efficient and better exploit our own energy resources.” Europe will of course still need to import energy (not counting shale gas, the EU only has 0.9 percent of global gas reserves and 0.4 percent of oil reserves), but Oettinger commented, “We want strong and stable partnerships with important suppliers, but must avoid falling victim to political and commercial blackmail.”

Not everyone’s happy with the proposals, however, with green groups decrying the emphasis on shale gas—which has so far only been tentatively explored in a few EU states—over renewables. Greenpeace’s energy policy director Franziska Achterberg told the Guardian that building gas infrastructure “will not cure the addiction to imported fossil fuels” and that Europe should instead “exploit the enormous potential for energy savings and home-grown renewables by setting ambitious targets for 2030.”