Here’s a quiz question: how much would you say the supply of non-Russian gas to Europe – including the UK – has gone up since the invasion of Ukraine?
It’s a pretty important question. After all, in the years before the invasion, Russian gas (coming in mostly through pipelines but, to a lesser extent, also on liquefied natural gas tankers) accounted for more than a third of our gas.
If Europe was going to stop relying on Russian gas, it would need either to source that gas from somewhere else or to learn to live without it. And while there might, a few decades hence, be a way of surviving without gas while also nursing important heavy industries, right now the technology isn’t there.
For decades, Europe – especially Germany, but also, to a lesser extent, Italy and other parts of Eastern Europe – built their economic models on building advanced machinery, with their plants fuelled by cheap Russian gas.
All of which is why that question matters. And so too does the answer. The conventional wisdom is that Europe has shored up its supplies of gas from…
