Natural gas and Brent oil, a benchmark in Europe, hit record highs not seen in several years.
For this Monday, March 7, the price of gas exceeded 300 euros/MWh. According to the newspaper NCT, this implies that for each euro that this input rises, the price of electricity increases by two euros. In a few days it would be over 600 euros/MWh.
This problem is a product of the war that Ukraine is experiencing due to the Russian invasion. And it is that European countries have had to release 60 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves, since Russia is the second largest producer of natural gas in the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
For their part, governments have begun to look for parallel options to reduce their independence from the energy they obtained from Russia. In 2021 alone, the European Union imported 155,000 million cubic meters of natural gas from that country. Which means 45% of the important ones in the European community and about 40% of its total gas consumption.
Meanwhile, transit flows through Ukraine accounted for more than 25% of Russian pipeline deliveries to the EU and the UK in 2021 , down from more than 60% in 2009. This indicates that Ukraine remains a major conduit for Russian gas to Europe (transiting around 8% of the combined EU and UK gas demand) and is also heavily dependent on imported gas for its own domestic use, according to the International Gas Agency. the Energy (IEA).
“We have to free ourselves from Russian gas, oil and coal “, emphasized the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, to later explain that the search for other gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers will have to take into account Note also that the new structure is also “compatible” with hydrogen.
” There is a part of renewables, but the majority is gas, oil and coal. This is going to change. With massive investments in renewables we will see a greater proportion and growth rate of renewables and that changes the structure of our market. We have to look therefore the composition of the market ,” he said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the White House and its allies are in talks to ban energy imports from Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
This situation occurs in the middle of the winter season in Europe, which runs from October to March, and in which its consumption of natural gas triples. It is also getting worse, considering that about 75% of the natural gas supply in the ‘old continent’ is transported by pipeline , according to the US Energy Information Administration.
This has led to certain limitations in the search for other providers of this asset.
Experts agree that energy security is in danger and could become a crisis if the conflict in Ukraine continues.