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The very simple fact is that we have enough gas right now. So Biden not permitting new LNG terminals in the US is perfectly fine for the EU. Not only that, but LNG is more expensive then pipeline gas and we are reducing gas consumption. So in the coming years we are reducing LNG consumption Also no coal will not be replaced by gas on a large scale in the electricity mix. Right now EU wide it makes up 13% of electricity production and we are adding a lot of renewables to our grid. So coal will be replaced by renewables, instead of fossil gas.
As long as Biden does not cut LNG supply from existing infrastructure in a big way, we will be just fine. The main new customers will be in Asia.
Literally paid propaganda for the fossil fuels industry. The death and destruction done by climate crisis will far outweigh anything Russia can do in Ukraine. Yet Europe (and the rest of the world) refuse to seriously transition away from fossil fuels despite understanding the necessity for decades now.
LNG doesn’t have to be fossil though. Biomethane is the same gas but made from waste.
The US LNG is however very much fossils, which isn’t great I agree.
If and when we switch primarily to that technology we can discuss that but I’m not optimistic about the technology. I don’t believe it’s capable of supplying current demand. We’ll need to greatly reduce gas demand first, then any remainder can come from biogas.
Besides, if Europe needs bio methane, they can produce it locally. The only reason to export from the US is its large fossil reserves.
The tech is already here, but yeah, it’s not enough to meet the demand. Not by a longshot. It’s very underutilised though. We could make a lot more biomethane than we currently do. If we can make enough I don’t know, but I’d like us to use that rather than fossils.
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Last year the EU produced 42% of its electricity with renewables. 18.9% of it with wind and 8.0% with solar. There is also a 24.5% share of nuclear, which is probably going to stay stable. That leaves 31.9% fossil fuels. So we have to a bit more then double wind and solar installations in the EU. That is entirly possible to do. Especially with offshore becoming as cheap as it is and we still have a lot of rooftops without solar.
About storage there is a wonderfull thing called electricity grids. The worst days for wind last year wind made up a bit less then 10% of electricity production. That is of an average of 18.9% over the entire year. For solar it is worse in wind, but luckily wind makes up a lot of the rest. Combined that means that the worst days still have 13% wind + solar EU wide. So about half of average. As soon as you extend it to a week the worst ones are at something like 17% of wind + solar. So with a strong enough grid we get pretty close. As soon as you add a bit of storage to the grid and overbuilt wind and solar a bit, renewables work just fine.
Honestly we are pretty close to solving it. Most EU countries are at over 50% clean electricity today. Even better Putin caused massive built ups of clean power generation. We are going to be fine, if we continue in that field.
Looking at monthly data from January 2022 to December 2022 (Figure 11), with the exception of March and April, consumption has been consistently below the 2017-2022 average of the respective months of those years. Between January and July 2022, natural gas consumption in the EU varied between 1 938 Petajoules (PJ) in January and 785 PJ in July, indicating a monthly decrease overall, even before the target of 15% gas reduction was set up
While the gas reserves are higher than ever (https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/infographics/gas-storage-capacity/)
Absolutely no reason to worry about supply, cold homes, or lights going out.
Absolutely no reason to worry about supply, cold homes, or lights going out.
This was always scare-mongering. The main consumers were the German petro-chemical industry producing for export and thus undercutting the European competition with cheap Russian gas. These have now largely shut down their old extremely wasteful plants as only the cheap energy supply was keeping them profitable and no amount of LNG would help with that.
In the short term this is of course not great for the German GDP (and company profits), but it forces them to innovate and switch to processes that can use renewable energy, so all in all that is probably a positive development.
