The EU is seeking to import more liquid gas from Nigeria to make up for shortfalls from Russia, a senior EU Commission official has said. Oil and gas output had been reduced by lawlessness. But Nigerian officials told the EU side “Come and talk to us again at the end of August because we think we can deliver real progress on this”, Matthew Baldwin, a Commission deputy director-general, told Reuters.
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DAKAR, Senegal — The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the largest old-growth rainforests on earth, is auctioning off vast amounts of land in a push to become “the new destination for oil investments,” part of a global shift as the world retreats on fighting climate change in a scramble for fossil fuels.
The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that store vast amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming.
“If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in Kinshasa.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring and led to U.S. and British bans on Russian energy and, last week, a call to ration natural gas in Europe.
At the same time, Norway, a leading advocate of saving forests, is increasing oil production with plans for more offshore drilling. And President Biden, who pledged early in his term to wean the world from fossil fuels, traveled to Saudi Arabia recently where he raised the need for more oil production. Back home, Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic climate agenda is largely doomed.
Congo has taken note of each of these global events, said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the nation’s lead representative on climate issues and an adviser to the minister of hydrocarbons.
Congo’s sole goal for the auction, he said, is to earn enough revenue to help the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth.
“That’s our priority,” Mr. Mpanu said, in an interview last week. “Our priority is not to save the planet.”
Congo announced the auction in May, with a video posted on Twitter that showed a shining river nestled in a deep bed of lush rainforest. The video quickly cut to a close-up of a filling station pump, where yellowish gas gushed into an automobile tank. The American and French oil giants Chevron and TotalEnergies were tagged in the post.
Environmental groups were outraged. Last week Congolese officials doubled down, expanding the number of blocks — vast parcels of land — up for grabs, from 16 to 30, comprising 27 oil and three gas blocks. TotalEnergies said it did not intend to bid, and Chevron did not respond to a request to comment. Other oil major producers also declined to comment.
The auction highlights a double standard that many political leaders across the African continent have called out: How can Western countries, which built their prosperity on fossil fuels that emit poisonous, planet-warming fumes, demand that Africa forgo their reserves of coal, oil and gas in order to protect everyone else?
“Maybe it’s time we get a level playing field and be compensated,” Mr. Mpanu said.
Many Congolese officials believe that after decades of colonialism and political mismanagement, their country’s needs should be prioritized against those of the world.
For President Tshisekedi, casting his nation as a bulwark against global warming has met with political realities.The country’s next presidential election is 18 months away, but the jostling has already begun with Mr. Tshisekedi running for another term. In 2018, he was declared the winner in a highly contested election. He cut a deal with his predecessor, the unpopular but still powerful Joseph Kabila, whom western officials have labeled corrupt. The pair’s arrangement fell apart in 2020, but some analysts caution that Mr. Kabila or his cronies could wind up on the ballot at a time when foreign investment is pouring into the country.
Just how much compensation is at stake for Congo is something that will not be known until seismic surveys are carried out — by itself a very destructive process,according to scientists.
In May, Didier Budimbu, Congo’s minister of hydrocarbons, said the country, which currently produces about 25,000 barrels of oil a day, had the potential to produce up to 1 million barrels. At current prices that’s the equivalent of $32 billion a year, more than half of Congo’s GDP.
Mr. Mpanu pointed to the Amazon as an example of how nations with natural resources must act if richer nations would not compensate them.
In 2007, Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president at the time, set up a trust fund that the international community could finance to stop the country from exploring an oil block in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. The goal was to raise around $3.6 billion. Years later, it had only raised $13 million. So in 2013, the government decided to allow oil exploration. Drilling began three years later.
“We’re not into threats,” Mr. Mpanu said, dismissing the notion that Congo’s auction was merely an attempt to scare countries into offering more financial assistance. “We have a very humble attitude. We have a sovereign right to go ahead.”
But scientists say going ahead could destroy precious rainforests and peatlands, which provide one of the last lines of defense for a planet struggling to limit rising temperatures.
Seismic surveys to identify oil deposits would entail long trails being cut through the rainforest and explosive charges being set off. Waste from the oil production process, which contains salt and heavy metals, could upset the salt balance of the entire Congo Basin ecosystem, as it has in the Amazon. Road construction, necessary for the oil industry, would open up vast areas of sparsely populated rainforest to human habitation, leading to increased logging.
It would likely also drain and dehydrate peatlands, peat experts said, ultimately leading to their decomposition and the release of the carbon they trap.
If this happened, said Susan Page, a physical geography professor at the University of Leicester in Britain, the huge amount of carbon very rapidly released “could be a type of tipping point, effectively, for global climate.”
Mr. Mpanu asserted that drilling could be “surgical” and that companies could find a way to drill diagonally to avoid touching the peat. He insisted that any action would be in keeping with global climate commitments and would come after extensive environmental impact reviews and studies of how local populations would be affected.
A Greenpeace team recently consulted people living inside the proposed oil blocks and said inhabitants were opposed to drilling and would launch protests, according to Ms. Wabiwa.
Rather than alleviating poverty, she said, the sale of oil blocks would make a lot of money for a few people.
Mr. Budimbu, Congo’s hydrocarbons minister, has consulted some of Africa’s biggest oil producers, like Angola, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, “so that the D.R.C. can take the same path,” according to a recent release on the ministry’s website.
But if Congo were to follow in their footsteps, it could mean a fate some call the “resource curse,” in which citizens don’t benefit from their country’s natural wealth and economic development remains anemic. In Nigeria, oil is the mainstay of the economy but its production has also led to devastating spills and widening inequality. In Equatorial Guinea, the majority of the population lives below the poverty line and reaps no benefit from the country’s vast oil wealth.
The decision to allow more exploration was carefully considered, government officials said, though it appeared to be the subject of some internal debate.
In March, Ève Bazaiba, Congo’s minister of environment, told The New York Times that officials were mulling going ahead. “Should we protect peatland because it’s a carbon sink or should we dig for oil for our economy?” she said.
Last week she indicated a willingness to back down on the auction.
“If we have an alternative to the oil exploitation, we’ll keep them,” she said, speaking of the peatland.
But Mr. Mpanu said Congo already has paid its climate dues. It allows the mining of minerals and metals such as cobalt and lithium that are key to the renewable energy industry and it plans to develop hydropower.
“We are part of the solution, but the solution also includes us making use of our oil resources,” he said.
He said the nation could seek to protect other land to offset what would be lost by drilling in places like Virunga, and noted that it would be up to oil companies to decide whether they would drill inside the park boundaries.
“If we lose 10 hectares we could now protect 20,” he said. “Sure, it won’t have the same biodiversity and fauna, but the country has that right.”
Asked what oil company, in an era where consumer awareness is higher than ever, would consider drilling in a protected gorilla habitat, Mr. Mpanu did not hesitate.
“It is what it is,” he said. “We just have to see how much people value that resource.”
Dionne Searcey reported from New York; Manuela Andreoni contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.
The bloc is looking to boost LNG imports from Nigeria
The EU is planning to increase liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from Nigeria amid concerns that supply from Russia may be cut, according to the deputy director general of the European Commission’s Energy Department.
“Europe is in a tight spot in relation to gas, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the instability in our gas market and the threat of cutting off supply altogether,” Matthew Baldwin said at a news conference in Abuja on Friday.
“So, we have launched the energy platform task force and the primary goal is to reach out to our reliable partners such as Nigeria to replace the gas from Russia with gas from reliable partners,” he said.
The EU is Nigeria’s major LNG buyer, with 60% of all LNG shipments from the country going to Europe, accounting for 14% of the bloc’s gas imports.
“We want to expand what is currently a 14% share of total LNG imports from Nigeria, we want that to go up,” Baldwin was quoted as saying.
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Gas price in Europe drops as Russian pipeline resumes deliveries
He added that the EU is seeking to expand their short-term LNG deliveries from Nigeria, “but at the moment, the capacity, the utilization rate of Nigerian LNG is too low.”
Baldwin said his current trip to the African country is mainly focused on fact finding, but representatives will meet again in August for further discussions. Commenting on the talks in Nigeria on his Twitter account, the European Commission official said there was “huge potential to replace Russian gas.”
The EU is the world’s largest LNG importer. In 2021, the bloc purchased 80 billion cubic meters of LNG. Among the union’s major LNG suppliers are the US (28%), Qatar and Russia (20% each), Nigeria (14%), and Algeria (11%).
Russia is Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas (41% of all EU gas imports as of 2021). However, in light of the situation in Ukraine, Europe earlier this year launched the REpowerEU plan, which focuses on lowering its dependence on Russian energy imports. These have recently dropped due to EU’s anti-Russia sanctions and their repercussions, Russia’s response, and technical problems. Europe now fears the situation could escalate and is seeking alternatives to Russian gas imports.
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT’s business section
Nord Stream 1, the pipeline that delivers natural gas from Russia to Germany, was shut down this week for annual maintenance. Typically, this is routine. But typically, a war isn’t raging in Europe.
That’s why Germany — and the rest of the European Union — was nervous that when the 10-day maintenance was scheduled to end on July 21, the pipeline wouldn’t come back online. Instead, Russia might keep it closed, or drastically reduce its flows, as retaliation against Germany and the rest of Europe for sanctions and their support for Ukraine.
The worst didn’t happen. Gas is flowing through Nord Stream 1 again as of Thursday morning, though at less than half of its capacity. More critically, the threat of Russia stopping or slowing gas deliveries to Europe persists, a harbinger foreven more economic disruption on the continent, and for a long, cold, and tumultuous winter.
Russia had already reduced and reduced the amount of natural gas it exports to Europe in recent weeks. In June, Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom slashed the amount of gas delivered through Nord Stream 1 by 60 percent, a decision it blamed on the West, saying a necessary turbine was out for repair in Canada but stuck therebecause of sanctions. Experts said this was a pretext, and a pretty flimsy one at that, but it still got Germany and Canada to act.
It is already getting difficult to insulate Germany’s economy, and Europe’s more broadly, from Russia’s energy threats — and that is further destabilizing the global economy.
Europe before the war got about 40 percent of its gas from Russia, mostly through pipelines; Germany relies on Russia for about a third of its gas imports. Even as European leaders have sanctioned Russian coal, started phasing in sanctions on seaborne Russian oil, and vowed to reduce Russian natural gas imports, Europe has struggled to wean itself off Russian energy, particularly natural gas. Europe is seeking alternatives but is finding it hard to secure speedy and affordable replacements for what once flowed easily via pipeline. European countries have also set storage targets for natural gas to head off disaster this winter, but Russia’s decrease in deliveries has made those already ambitious goals much harder to reach.
On Wednesday, the European Union confronted this crisis, putting itself on almost a wartime footing with an emergency plan to reduce gas consumption now to avoid more dramatic shortages this winter, even as the current heat wave is exacerbating the continent’s energy crunch. The proposal calls on EU countries to ration gas and decrease usage by about 15 percent across the bloc.
“Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday.
Europe’s reliance on Russian gas has always been a weapon available to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and now he is wielding it. Putin may believe that energy pressures — fuel price increases, households unable to heat their homes, industry floundering, and all of it hastening a recession — could exploit cracks in the Western alliance and tear apart Europe itself.
A young Ukrainian rallies against Uniper Energy, Germany’s largest importer of gas from Russia, in front of the company’s headquarters in Duesseldorf, Germany, on July 14.Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Putin is using his “point of maximum leverage to try to obtain the greatest concessions,” said Jeff Makholm, managing director of NERA Economic Consulting. “And the point of maximum leverage is in the lead-up to the winter of 2023.”
Europe knows this, which is why it has sought to move away from Russian energy any way it can. That looks like it’s going to happen — just not quite according to the original plan. “It’s not the European countries which have basically managed to reduce the imports of Russian gas,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, global research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It’s Russia.”
Russia has been progressively reducing gas. Then it came for Nord Stream 1.
On Wednesday, von der Leyen said that at least 12 countries have been hit by a partial or total gas cutoff, and the amount of gas flowing to Europe is less than one-third what it was this time last year.
Russia’s delivery slowdown is already disrupting European industries, forcing some factories to shut down. One of Germany’s largest energy providers is seeking a bailout from the government; reductions in gas could eventually bring certain factories to a standstill. These cutbacks are also likely to hurt smaller, less wealthy European countries even more, especially those that are more dependent on Russia and have fewer resources to deflect a crisis. Germany is encouraging people to take shorter, colder showers; Berlin has turned down the temperature on its swimming pools. “It’s better to have a cold shower in summer than a cold apartment in winter,” said Jürgen Krogmann, the mayor of Oldenburg, a city in northwestern Germany, in the Washington Post.
The fear of a more dramatic cutoff of Russian gas has intensified Europe’s urgency to head off this crisis, one that has been months (or arguably, decades) in the making. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia had not increased gas deliveries to meet European demand and, in the months since the war began, it has gradually tightened the tap. At the same time, Europe, along with other allies, put punishing sanctions on Russia and made very clear it wanted to target Russia’s energy sector, while also trying to minimize some of the pain to its members.
“The more Western leaders threaten to sanction Russian oil exports in whatever form they’re going to sanction it, the more the Russians will shift the battleground to gas,” said Edward Chow, a senior associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Because for Europe, Russian gas as a whole is a lot harder to replace than it is to replace Russian oil.”
A gas receiving station of the Nord Stream 1 Baltic Sea pipeline is seen before sunrise on July 11, when Nord Stream 1 was shut down for maintenance.Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images
Nord Stream 1 was the latest battleground. In June, Gazprom drastically reduced the amount of gas flowing through the pipeline before shutting it down for annual maintenance. Moscow blamed the cuts on problems with gas-pumping turbines. One of those turbines had been sent to Montreal, Canada, for repairs but couldn’t be returned because of sanctions. Most experts see the turbine issue as manufactured by Moscow, but the Canadian government ultimately granted an exemption for the turbine, which it’s reportedly shipped back. Canada defended its decision, saying it would support Europe’s access to “reliable and affordable” energy as it transitions. Ukraine condemned the move, but allies, including the United States, defended it.
Nord Stream 1 is pumping gas again on Thursday. Right now, officials suggest the gas flow is at about 40 percent capacity — about what the pipeline was delivering before the 10-day shutdown. On Tuesday, Putin claimed that Gazprom still hadn’t received the necessary documents for the turbine, which meant that, while Nord Stream 1 would turn back on,the volumes of gas arriving through it would be reduced — although Putin suggested the West only has itself to blame for its sanction restrictions. Of course, Putin added, if Europe wanted, it could finally start Nord Stream 2, another pipeline that Germany froze on the eve of Russia’s invasion. But he also indicated that might not even be able to deliver all the gas Europeans want.
That uncertainty is a deliberate play on Putin’s part, and it has forced Europe to plan for a crisis in case Russia continues this pressure. And even though Nord Stream 1 is up and running again, the reduced deliveries are still putting Europe on edge. Which is exactly what Putin wants.
Putin is using gas to try to drive divisions in Europe
Russian gas was a good deal, until it wasn’t. Europe, especially industrial powerhouses like Germany, relied on the cheap and easy access to Russian gas to build up its industries.
Plenty of allies and partners warned that Europe’s deepening energy relationship with Russia was risky, and that Putin could use projects like Nord Stream 2 to undermine Europe’s energy and national security. But some defended the cooperation; Germany, for example, framed Nord Stream as an economic project, separate from its political relationship with Russia. “The partnership is very, very deep, in Germany in particular. But they never, ever thought that there will be a moment where there will be a total disruption, because they saw that as an equal relationship. Russia is giving us natural gas, we are giving Russia money,” Corbeau said.
The Ukraine invasion shattered that notion, but it didn’t change the reality: that Europe still needed Russian gas. This was always a complicating factor when the West sought to punish Moscow for its invasion, and is part of the reason it was so surprising that European leaders punished Russia more aggressively than many predicted before Russia’s escalation. That choice was always going to inflict pain on Europe, too. In some of the debates over sanctions — as with the EU’s ban on Russian oil — divisions started to emerge, with countries like Hungary getting carveouts. Putin is not exactly going to let those slide. “Mr. Putin, he likes to divide and rule,” Corbeau said.
Division, especially, is what Putin is after. The war in Ukraine is nearing the six-month mark. Russia failed in its initial war aims to take Kyiv, but after shifting its focus to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, it is slowly, but brutally and unforgivingly, expanding its territorial control in the region. Threatening gas supplies to Europe is a tool Putin can use “to split Europe when it comes to sanctions or military assistance to Ukraine,” said Veronika Grimm, member of the German Council of Economic Experts and professor of economics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell speaks before a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on July 18. They discussed tightening sanctions on Russia, and were looking at ways to add a ban on gold exports in hopes that the measures might finally start to have a decisive impact on the war in Ukraine.Virginia Mayo/AP
According to a June poll, 59 percent of Europeans see the defense of European values such as freedom and democracy as a priority, even if it affects prices and the cost of living. But Putin is banking that as the war drags on, and as energy becomes more expensive or harder to get, this opinion will soften.
Putin has been careful to frame the reduced gas deliveries as the West’s fault — it’s the sanctions, or the turbines stuck because of sanctions, that are causing all the problems. We want to deliver the gas, if you guys would just let us. This is also likely why Russia is reducing the amount of gas it sends to Europe, rather than just cutting it off outright. “The picture is that Russia does not violate contracts when it comes to the trade with Europe, but Europe applies a lot of trade sanctions and violates what was agreed upon beforehand,” Grimm said.
“He has the narrative that he can use in order to manipulate opinions in Russia and in third countries, and partly also in Europe,” she added.
Europe may feel the brunt of Russia’s pressure, but it will add to the Ukraine war’s economic shocks around the globe. Fuel prices will increase. If Europe’s economy suffers, other economies will suffer, too. Putin is also trying to sell the world on the idea that it is the West, not his unprovoked war on Ukraine, that is responsible for this turmoil.
Putin’s strategy may not succeed, but it will be disruptive, even as Nord Stream 1 remains online in some form. No matter the course of the Ukraine war, the energy relationship between Europe and Russia is likely permanently altered. Europe is trying to accelerate its breakup with Russia, but getting gas and oil from elsewhere requires building new infrastructure and new relationships.
Those are all longer-term solutions to an immediate problem. For now, as experts said, politicians and officials must level with the public and take steps to decrease demand. That may mean letting prices go up; that may mean turning down the air conditioner in a heat wave; that may mean choosing which businesses get supplied and which do not.
“It’s going to be painful, but they really have no choice. This chicken is going to come home to roost now or later,” Makholm said. “Russia knows its long-term interests in gas supplies to the EU were dead anyway. And so it’s exercising its maximum pressure right now.”
BRUSSELS — Europe must drastically cut its use of natural gas immediately, and by a total of 15 percent between now and the springtime, to prevent a major crisis as Russia slashes gas exports, the European Union’s executive branch said on Wednesday, calling for hard sacrifices by the people of the world’s richest group of nations.
“Russia is blackmailing us,” the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said as she introduced the E.U. plan to reduce gas consumption. “Russia is using energy as a weapon.”
Months before it invaded Ukraine in February, upending energy markets and other facets of the global economy, “Russia kept gas supply intentionally as low as possible despite the high gas prices,” she said.
The flow of Russian gas, which provides 40 percent of E.U. consumption, was less than one-third the normal average in June. Gas storage facilities in Europe, normally almost full at this point in the year in preparation for winter, are not sufficiently stocked to deal with such volatility and shortages, threatening to upend industry and private lives alike.
“We have to prepare for a potential full disruption of Russian gas, and this is a likely scenario,” Ms. von der Leyen said.
The European Union has already banned most imports of Russian oil, after painstaking negotiations this spring among the 27 member states that made exceptions for some small countries like Hungary and Slovakia. The plan to cut gas use is expected to be much easier to adopt when E.U. energy ministers meet in Brussels next Tuesday, because unlike the oil embargo, it does not require unanimity.
If member nations agree to the plan and the new legislation that goes with it, the commission, the bloc’s executive arm, would ultimately be able to force countries to stick to gas consumption limits if they fail to do so voluntarily. The commission’s proposal did not specify what enforcement mechanism would be used.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on Wednesday acknowledged that his country has broader ambitions in Ukraine that it had previously admitted, the latest indication that the war is nowhere near finished, despite a pause in Moscow’s eastern offensive. Moscow has repeatedly changed its description of its war aims, giving contradictory statements about whether it meant to topple Ukraine’s government or annex territory.
In recent months the Kremlin has cast the war as being primarily about seizing the Donbas region in the east, but Mr. Lavrov spoke of holding captured territory in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia areas in the south, as well. A U.S. National Security Council spokesman said Wednesday that Russia means to annex conquered territory, justifying it with sham referendums.
European public opinion is split over whether supporting Ukraine is worth the sacrifice, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is counting on Europeans being unwilling to pay a high price for Ukrainian freedom, and pressuring their leaders to strike a deal with Moscow.
Still, public fatigue with Europe’s support of Ukraine may be overstated. A poll in Germany, the largest E.U. nation and the one most reliant on Russian gas imports, last week found that only 22 percent wanted their government to curb support to Ukraine to bring down energy prices; 70 percent of respondents said they wanted the German government to continue strongly backing Ukraine despite the economic fallout.
In the fight for public opinion, Olena Zelenska, the wife of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, addressed the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, asking for more weapons to defend against what she called the “Russian hunger games.”
Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War
“An unprovoked invasive terrorist war is being waged against my country,” she added. “Russia is destroying our people.”
One obstacle to the E.U. plan to cut gas use is that it makes a uniform demand that each country cut consumption by 15 percent between Aug. 1 and March 31, which may be seen as unfair to those like Italy, Spain and France that do not buy much gas from Russia.
The main argument to get all E.U nations on board, despite their different levels of vulnerability, is that the bloc’s economies are so interconnected that a blow to one is a blow to all.
“The choice we have today is triggering solidarity now or waiting for an emergency that will force solidarity upon us,” said Frans Timmermans, a senior Dutch politician who is the commission’s energy and climate czar.
He said savings in gas around the E.U. would create spare capacity to direct to the countries most in need in the wintertime, ensuring that no member state goes into economic shock because of the lack of power.
Ms. von der Leyen, putting a political spin on a seemingly economic issue, said this approach would deliver a blow to Mr. Putin, who wants to sow discord within the European Union, undermining the bloc and its most powerful countries economically and politically. Determined to make that backfire on him, European leaders have drawn closer together since the war began and have taken the first step toward possibly making Ukraine an E.U. member — something Mr. Putin set out to prevent.
“Putin is trying to push us around this winter and he will dramatically fail if we stick together,” Ms. von der Leyen said.
With Russia having slashed or completely cut gas supply to a dozen E.U. countries already, and the looming threat that it will not fully reconnect an important pipeline on Thursday that has been offline for maintenance, the bloc’s alternatives are few. Mr. Putin suggested late Tuesday that natural gas would resume flowing to Europe through the pipeline, but warned that supplies may be severely curtailed.
Experts say that, along with E.U. efforts to line up new suppliers, cutting demand for gas is the only way to survive relatively unscathed this winter.
Simone Tagliapietra, an expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, said the European Commission plan “goes in the right direction,” but he warned that a lot hinges on clear and honest communication between governments and Europeans.
“This requires serious and straightforward communication to the public,” he said. “Governments must ask people to consume less and should have the courage to tell their citizens that Europe is in the midst of what possibly represents the greatest energy crisis in its history.”
The commission itself recognized the importance of appealing directly to the public, and said in its proposal that a critical part of its plan was a mass-media campaign urging people to do their part to conserve, primarily by cutting heating and cooling at home.
The commission predicts that major disruptions to the flow of Russian gas could shave off as much as 1.5 percentage points off an already-degraded economic growth forecast of 2.7 percent this year, and could even plunge the bloc into recession next year.
When the war began, the European Union responded with sanctions on Russia but cutting off energy imports was seen as a distant prospect, at most. Within months, positions had hardened enough to impose a near-total embargo on Russian oil by the end of this year. Yet a ban on Russian gas has remained off the table because so much of Europe depends on it, and alternative sources are scarce.
Gas makes up a quarter of the bloc’s energy mix — it fuels factories and electric power plants, and it is overwhelmingly what Europeans use to heat their homes. Major disruptions would affect not just industrial output, but also Europeans’ ability to stay warm through the winter.
European officials have been scrambling to line up alternative sources of gas and other fuels. Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy signed a deal that would increase his country’s imports of Algerian gas 20 percent in the short-term. President Emmanuel Macron of France increased his country’s supply of diesel from the United Arab Emirates — one of many European deals that lean into dirtier fossil fuels like oil and coal to make up for the diminishing supply of gas.
The European Commission is also trying to secure more gas from other established suppliers for European countries, such as Nigeria, Egypt and Qatar, while Norway, a neighbor and close ally, has already boosted its supply to the bloc.
Another short-term move is importing liquefied natural gas from the United States, following a pledge by President Biden during a visit to Brussels in March, but experts warn that it is an expensive alternative, in limited supply.
Some of Europe’s whirlwind commercial diplomacy will take years to bear fruit. This week, Ms. von der Leyen visited Azerbaijan to secure extra gas — by 2027.
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