European thermometers dropped this week. But generally speaking it has been a relatively mild winter and temperatures are starting to rise. This is good news for Ukraine. Good news for Europe. Bad news for Russia and great news for America.
Twelve months ago the Western Alliance was seriously worried that Europe’s reliance on Russian gas and oil would render it powerless to stand up to Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The outlook is now considerably brighter. Cash-strapped consumers turned down thermostats. Russian gas supplies have been cut by two-thirds. Nordstream pipelines have shut down (thank you saboteurs whomever you may be). New storage facilities have been built for liquefied natural gas (LNG). The US has increased its shipments of LNG and Europe is moving faster towards renewable energy sources.
Glitches remain. Landlocked countries such as Austria, Hungary and Slovakia remain heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas and some 20 billion cubic metres (BCM) of Russian gas is still being pumped by pipeline into the EU. Ironically, the pipeline runs through Ukraine. Also, Europeans have increased purchases of Russian LNG, but moves are afoot to reverse that.
The bulk of Europe’s gas is now coming from America. Exports from the US are up 137 percent from a year ago. Companies such as Chevron and Exxon have stepped up fracking operations in Texas, Appalachia, New Mexico and Louisiana. They freeze the gas in terminals and then ship it to Europe. There it is transferred to either newly built storage facilities or specially adapted ships where it is returned to its gaseous state and piped to homes, power stations and factories.
The US has emerged as an energy super power and filled the Russian gap, but its motives are not entirely philanthropic. Energy companies sell their gas to European customers at an average of $34.06 per million British Thermal Units (BTU) while the same product sells in Asia for $29.99 per million BTU and in the US for only $6.12 per million BTU. Exxon’s share price is hitting new highs and its executives anticipate a bull market for another two or three years.
By the end of 2022, Europe had reduced imports of Russian energy by two-thirds and was on target to wean itself off Russian gas entirely by 2027. To achieve this it must step up the switch to renewables as well as continue imports of American LNG. There are three main sources of renewables: Wind, nuclear and hydrogen and solar as a possible fourth.
Wind currently provides about 18 percent of Europe’s energy needs and is the renewable energy sector in which the EU and Britain are investing most heavily at the moment. Britain’s island status makes it especially attractive to wind-generated power and the UK currently produces a quarter of its energy needs from high-tech windmills. Denmark and the Netherlands follow closely.
Nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima, have made many wary of nuclear power. Germany was set to totally eliminate its nuclear power industry when Russia invaded Ukraine and the government of Chancellor Olof Scholz reversed a decision to mothball the country’s three remaining nuclear plants. France, in contrast, generates about 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy. Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU officially branded nuclear power as a “green” energy.
Germany is banking heavily on green hydrogen as the energy source of the future. It has so far invested $10 billion in 62 large scale hydrogen projects across the country. These sites will use electricity generated by nuclear, wind or solar power to electrolyse water molecules so that they are split into their constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be extracted and used as a fuel. The United States is also investing heavily in green hydrogen.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain". To subscribe to his email alerts on world affairs click here.
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11 Comments
America does what it always has – looking after number 1…Selling filthy fracked gas to EU customers at inflated prices – no qualms about the environmental impact there !
Hydrogen is not a renewable energy source; it’s a method of transporting and storing energy. It’s also quite inefficient. While there are lobbies for using hydrogen for home heating, air source heat pumps avoid the conversion penalties of electrolysis.
The USA is doing very well out of Putin’s war. Europe is now dependent on US gas, which they were having trouble selling, and their arms industries are doing very well too. Which is not to suggest that giving in to the Russian war aims is a good idea.
Green hydrogen is not a solution to ‘how do we heat our homes?’. It is one solution to ‘What do we do with our surplus green energy on a windy day in summer if we are going to put in enough wind and solar capacity for still Winter evenings’. We should at least be looking to replace blue hydrogen for all its current uses and substituting it for other reducing agents in industrial processes where possible.
More urgently, we need to be looking at diversifying our portfolio of renewable energy sources to include more predictable ones such as tidal head, tidal flow, ocean current and small-scale hydro.
There is nowhere near enough development of water/tidal power which does not need wind or solar.
Tidal – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-57991351
2MW tidal generator, quite impressive for a start.
On tidal power stations. The French opened their station at Rance in November 1966.
240 MW. THAT is a good start.
2 W. Not so much.
Tidal head generation (barages like Rance and lagoons as proposed in Swansea Bay) is a mature technology and we should already have a lot of it in place. Tidal flow is still a developing technology. The Orkney trial is promising but there are limited opportunities for surface deployed turbines. They need to be in areas without large ships. That largely means between islands in Scotland. The biggest opportunity for tidal flow is a ‘fence’ across the Bristol Channel. That requires very large turbines deployed far enough beneath the surface that they do not interact with shipping. There are no leaps of technology required. This is about design, scale and political commitment.
” Nordstream pipelines have shut down (thank you saboteurs whomever you may be) ..”
This is a rather odd statement. There was no need to sabotage the pipelines. The resultant huge release of methane gas into the atmosphere is little short of an environmental disaster. The Russians weren’t pumping any gas into the pipeline at their end!
European countries also have the option of closing the valves on the pipelines at the western end.
So, can someone explain why whoever did this considered it to be necessary?
@peter – it is my understanding that the pipelines that cross Ukraine are still intact… so Russia will need to continue paying an independent Ukraine.
European thermometers dropped this week. But generally speaking it has been a relatively mild winter and temperatures are starting to rise.
Western Europe has been very fortunate; most of the world, in both northern and southern hemispheres, have had their coldest winter in decades…
‘Coldest winter on the Central Coast and Los Angeles since 1978-79’ [March 2023]:
https://www.ksby.com/news/local-news/coldest-winter-on-the-central-coast-and-los-angeles-since-1978-79
The global average temperature has now been in a cooling trend for seven years and last month it fell below the 30-year baseline…
‘Global Temperatures Fall Below 30-Year Baseline, Now Down 0.75C From 2016 Peak’ [February 2023]:
https://electroverse.co/temps-fall-below-30-year-baseline-now-down-0-75c-from-2016/
Western Europe has escaped much of this cold weather by being on the southern side of the Northern Hemisphere’s jet stream which is now meridional (wavy rather than zonal like a halo). This is hypothesised as being due to cyclically low solar activity (magnetic flux not insolation)…
‘Grand Solar Minimum And The Swings Between Extremes’ [February 2023]:
https://electroverse.co/grand-solar-minimum-and-the-swing-between-extremes/
The Nordstream explosion seems to be so against the interests of anyone capable of pulling it off (except possibly rival gas suppliers) that I’d have to go for its being an almighty act of incompetence. Nobody can currently do that as well as the Russian Government.