The Americans and Ukrainians are using gas as a weapon to keep Germany "on message" with respect to Russia policy.
The main point of Nord Stream 2 is to bypass Ukraine. This has two effects.
- Transit fees for gas travelling from Russia and Turkmenistan to EU Europe are a major prop under the Ukrainian economy. Knock out that prop and Ukraine will face a financial crisis.
- Having the pipelines pass through Ukraine means that a major part of the EU's energy supply is effectively hostage to the Ukraine-Russia drama and thus EU Europe need to back American policy to maintain the status quo.
Going by BP's figures (these are highly regarded), there are four main reserves of natural gas in the world - Russia, Iran, Qatar, and Turkmenistan.
- Iran - The Americans are doing everything in their power to prevent Iran from exporting gas.
- Qatar - They are in the middle of a potential conflict zone, with Saudi Arabia recently threatening to invade them.
- Turkmenistan - Their gas exports to Europe pass through Russia and so go through the same pipelines.
- Russia - Much of their gas exports pass through Ukraine, and so are precarious unless a way to bypass this route is found.
Let's look at some numbers.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Here's the top 5 gas importers, plus the total for the world and the total for the EU. Values are in millions of cubic metres. We can see that the EU accounts for about 44 per cent of total world imports and Germany alone accounts for more than 10 per cent of global imports. In other words, if the EU, including Germany, wish to derive a significant amount of their energy from natural gas, they must get it from globally significant exportable sources. There's no point in saying that country 'x' has gas to sell if the amount they can export is not able to satisfy EU demand over a period of several decades.
— | World | 957,600 |
— | European Union | 420,600 |
1 | Japan | 99,774 |
2 | Germany | 99,630 |
3 | Italy | 70,200 |
4 | United Kingdom | 53,630 |
5 | Korea, South | 51,888 |
Here's a list of the top 5 gas exporters. Values are in millions of cubic metres. You will note that no single one of them are capable of supplying all of EU demand. It's also worth noting that Russia are far and away the world's largest exporter and note the very rapid drop off in export capacity as we go down the list. These numbers are not entirely up to date so there may be some variation on this with current numbers, but the general order of magnitude of these numbers should be around the same. And keep in mind that all of these exporters are already supplying existing customers, so you can't simply go to one of them and say "I'll have all of your gas, thank you". You would have to build completely new export infrastructure, assuming that the gas reserves there are sufficient to support additional production and exports. And of course most of this gas from these major exporters is
already going to the EU.
1 | Russia | 197,700 |
2 | Qatar | 123,900 |
3 | Norway | 112,000 |
4 | Canada | 78,250 |
5 | Netherlands | 53,650 |
Here is a list of the top 5 countries by natural gas reserves, plus I've included Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, and the UK as references. Values are in cubic kilometres. You can see there are 4 globally significant exportable reserves which can supply over a period of decades if the export infrastructure is there. Qatar have lots of gas, but they are already exporting it, and they are potentially an even less secure supplier. Turkmenistan's gas exports to the EU go through Russia, and most of their exports are currently committed to China anyway.
Russia | 1 | 35,000 |
Iran | 2 | 33,200 |
Qatar | 3 | 24,900 |
Turkmenistan | 4 | 19,500 |
United States | 5 | 8,700 |
Australia | | 3,600 |
Norway | | 1,700 |
Netherlands | | 700 |
United Kingdom | | 200 |
So, there is no country which can currently step in and replace Russia as a gas supplier to the EU. Iran has the potential to do so, given enough time and investment. They are even less politically acceptable to the US than Russia are however.
So your options appear to be:
- Make the US unhappy by buying gas from Russia.
- Make the US unhappy by buying gas from Iran.
- Run everything on coal, much of which you would probably have to import from Russia anyway. This would probably take decades to achieve.
- Make the Green Party happy by relying on windmills, solar panels, and happy thoughts.
- Build lots of nuclear power plants, a process that will take decades.
- Emulate Texas and freeze in the dark.
I see lots of people talking about Germany and Russian gas. What I don't see is many people talking about actual solutions that are grounded in reality. So far as energy supplies go, EU Europe can only choose the least bad of several options while balancing risk between them.