Donald Trump stated in his first address to Congress as US president on March 4 that “Europe has sadly spent more money buying Russian oil and gas than they have spent on defending Ukraine.”
Trump has not always been known for his statistical accuracy, but he may be correct in this instance.
According to a report released on Thursday by Ember, an energy think tank, last year, European purchases of Russian gas totaled 21.9 billion euros ($23.66 billion), compared to 18.7 billion euros ($20.17 billion) in financial aid to Ukraine.
Military assistance was not included in that figure.
Since the start of the war, the European Union has provided or committed $ 94 billion in military, financial, and reconstruction aid to Ukraine.
Ember expressed concern that the EU had increased its imports of Russian gas by 18% last year, far from its promised plan to completely eliminate it by 2027.
To achieve its own security, economic, and climate goals, the EU must start with a clear path for the Russian gas phase-out, according to Ember.
Ukrainian ambassadors to Kyiv were informed in January by Vladyslav Vlasiuk, a presidential adviser to the president of Ukraine, that the country was upset by last year’s imports of EU gas from Russia.
He claimed that it is time to stop the petrodollar flow that is causing Russia’s aggression.
It’s true that Russia imported more Russian gas in 2023 and 2024, and it will import even more because the US cannot supply more, according to Yiannis Bassias, a veteran of the hydrocarbon industry and energy analyst at Amphorenergy.
In 2024, there were 45 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Russian gas, compared to 57 billion cubic meters (bcm) of US gas.
reducing the volume of Russian energy exports to Europe
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the EU has significantly decreased its imports of energy from Russia.
Russian gas supply to Europe reached 179 billion cubic meters at its highest level in a new report released on Wednesday.
Europe purchased 142bcm of Russian gas a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to the OIES report, that volume dropped to just 31 bcm in 2024 as a direct result of factors linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it could be as low as 16 to 18 bcm in 2025.
Because all of Russia’s gas was previously supplied via outdated pipelines.
In September 2022, unidentified actors blew up one of the twin Nord Stream I pipelines. The four pipelines, which each carried 110 bcm of gas annually, were constructed.
Russia stopped all gas flow by May 2022, a move likely planned a year earlier, according to OIES, and Poland prohibited further gas imports from Russia across its territory. This is because another 33bcm of Russian gas could enter Europe via the Yamal pipeline, which crosses Belarus and Poland.
A pair of pipelines across Ukraine allowed the importation of an additional 65 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, but Ukraine did not do so when its five-year transit contract expired in December.
TurkStream, the only remaining Russian gas pipeline, travels through Bulgaria and Serbia to Hungary and passes through Bulgaria and Serbia to meet its 20 billion cubic meters of annual capacity.
OIES director Jonathan Stern stated to Al Jazeera that the main issue facing the industry today is whether a ceasefire or peace will lead to the return of Russian pipeline gas and the relaxation of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) sanctions.
The report suggests that it won’t be simple because pipeline operators are currently required to be bailed out of bankruptcy, repairs and maintenance must be performed, mutual sanctions must be lifted, and a number of breach-of-contract disputes involving hundreds of millions of dollars are resolved through arbitration.
Similar efforts have been made by the EU to defraud Russian oil, but they have had mixed results.
Before approving it in December of that year, Russia imported 88.4 million tonnes of oil in 2022.
By the end of last year, the official EU imports of Russian oil had decreased by 90%, according to the European statistical service. However, this is likely misleading because two-thirds of those imports were made by a Russian shadow fleet.
According to the Kyiv School of Economics, Russia generated $ 189 billion in sales of crude oil and refined petroleum products last year, up from $ 178 billion in 2023.
Good politics versus good economics
Ember thinks that economic decisions made by EU countries are bad.
By 2030, the EU will have a gas surplus of 131 billion cubic meters, according to estimates from the report.
Because Europe imports almost all of its hydrocarbons, it claims, saps it of money to transform grids and transition to renewable energy and exposes it to price volatility and uncertain supply.
Ember and Stern disagreed.
When questioned about whether gas was a necessary investment by 2030, he replied, “No, most governments or the European Commission [think] that because otherwise they wouldn’t continue to spend money on new infrastructure. The answer may be different if the date is changed to 2050.
Others argued that the key to choosing an EU was better politics than economics.
According to Bassias, “the biggest thing for the US and Russia is to open navigational routes in the Arctic and conduct joint oil and gas exploration there.”
He claimed that they were “tacitly cooperating under Biden,” and that it was now official, suggesting that the Ukraine war had hampered that effort.
Miltiadis Aslanoglou, an expert on energy, said, “If one wanted to be strict about imports of energy, one could be.”
Russia is being told by Europe that “we do not depend on you,” which is what it wanted to say. Russia will always be there, it will always be a neighbor, which makes it very difficult to bring its gas trade to zero [diplomatically]. Europe keeps its doors open, Aslanoglou claimed to Al Jazeera.
He suggested that Europe was supporting the once-impressive Russian gas company Gazprom.
No one even knows whether Gazprom will even be around in another five years, according to Aslanoglou, noting that “Gazprom is certainly not the trillion-dollar company it was five years ago.” It is currently in dire financial predicaments. The pipeline network, which is 50 or 60 years old, is hardly up to par with in Russia.
Values versus realism
A different perspective is held by Ukraine.
According to analysis from the Ukrainian organization Frontelligence Insight, its long-range drone strikes inside Russia since September 2017 suggested a policy change from striking ammunition depots to cutting off Russian export revenues from refined petroleum products.
This year, Ukraine has attempted to kill Gazprom by using attack drones to destroy the Russkaya compressor, which pressurizes gas from TurkStream, Russia’s only remaining pipeline.
Russia reported that on January 13 and on March 1, it detonated three drones close to the compressor in the Krasnodar region.
On February 17, Ukraine attempted to shut off Russia’s crude oil offloading terminal in Novorossiysk in the Black Sea, but it was successful.
This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a priority of a ceasefire in the Black Sea, likely to stop any additional Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s most important economic lifeline.
In a “good politics” scenario involving Russia, Ukraine does not appear to be the only loser.
According to the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review on Monday, Europe’s decarbonization efforts were beginning to produce tangible results.
The IEA reported that while global energy demand increased by 2.2% last year, emissions only increased by 0.8% as a result of the increase in renewable energy capacity, which is a 22nd consecutive annual record for new installed capacity.
That demonstrated that “global economic growth is still disassociated from the growth in energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions,” according to the IEA.
Similar to what Ember’s message was. Europe is low on hydrocarbons, in contrast to Russia and the US.
Due to its dependence on imported hydrocarbons, Eurostat only generated 37 percent of its energy needs overall last year.
Source: Aljazeera
Leave a Reply