Put industry before consumers? Electricity before heating? Big cities before small towns? The political risks of the decisions here are obviously high. So any rationing plan is likely to be very unequal: In order to sustain pressure in high-priority pipes, the gas may have to be turned off altogether to lower-priority pipes. A big enough shortfall going into the pipe can translate into a 100 percent shortage at the other end. If the network doesn’t contain enough gas, the pressure drops and the gas cannot move. Gas is pushed through pipelines under pressure. Perhaps the most dangerous point of vulnerability is within the German network itself. An underwater pipeline across the Caspian could bring that gas to the Azerbaijan network. Turkmenistan has built a pipeline to the Caspian Sea. Gas might also someday come from farther afield in Central Asia. The EU is hastening to sign new contracts with Azerbaijan, moving the gas via a pipeline across Turkey to Southern Europe. A new facility at Wilhelmshaven, on Germany’s North Sea coast, might be ready late this year or early next. It has some capacity for receiving more liquid natural gas by sea and is rushing to provide more. Germany’s network could receive more gas from neighbors nearer than Spain via France. If work resumed today, the project would take at least three years to finish. An ambitious project to build a major new pipeline from Spain to France was abandoned in 2019. Spain also has large facilities for receiving liquid natural gas by ship, but it has only a few small pipeline connections to the rest of Europe. For example, Spain imports much of its natural gas from North Africa through underwater pipelines. Those networks commit countries to patterns of distribution that are not fast, easy, or cheap to change.

Gas moves to homes and factories via networks of pipelines. The mood, to quote one of them, is “tense.” I spoke this week with several German energy and economic experts to assess how those preparations are going. That bet is a bust, and Germany must now scramble through the warm-weather months to prepare for Russian economic warfare.

A generation of German politicians bet their country’s energy security on faith in Russia as a reliable supplier. Germany ranks high among the countries most at risk. The threat of Russian embargo explains the sharp decline in the value of the euro, now trading at close to parity with the U.S. It predicts a surge in inflation and outright recession in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The International Monetary Fund has modeled the effect of a Russian gas embargo. In the one ahead, he seems likely to launch it. Last winter, Putin brandished Russia’s gas weapon. The European Union Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, warned last week that a total Russian cutoff was “likely,” and she urged member countries to plan to reduce their gas consumption by 15 percent (from their average level of use over the past five years).

Now Putin is constraining supply again, this time apparently intending to push European countries into outright shortages over the winter ahead. Putin seems to have expected that low reserves of gas would intimidate European governments into accepting his aggression.Īnne Applebaum: The war won’t end until Putin loses The supply squeeze in the summer and fall of 2021 left Europeans with dangerously low reserves over the winter of 2021–22. Major European gas importers store the gas in natural caverns and cavities underground and offshore, then draw down the reserves as needed during colder weather.Īs Russian President Vladimir Putin planned his invasion of Ukraine in 2021, he honored Russia’s long-term contracts-but found excuses to stop selling into European short-term spot markets, despite the lucrative opportunities presented by last fall’s soaring prices. Through the warmer months, they buy gas to stockpile. Those explanations may not be wholly false: Just as the Russian army turned out to be a much more broken-down organization than advertised, so the Russian natural-gas industry may be more broken-down as well.īut the interruptions and disruptions to gas supplies over the past weeks represented an ominous foreshadowing of what Russia might do to Europe this winter.Įuropean countries use much more gas in the winter than they do in the summer. Russia has offered technical reasons and excuses for the shutdown: These were maintenance issues, according to the state-owned Gazprom. On July 25, the flow was disrupted again, falling to about 20 percent of usual seasonal volumes. At the end of last week, the flow briefly resumed, though slower than usual.

For 10 days in mid-July, Russian gas stopped flowing to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.

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