Interesting post here from the pre shale days of long ago, although shale moves so fast that means we're talking November 2008, touching on the easy story of the Russia narrative and finds :
Conventional wisdom has it that Russia dominates Europe’s natural gas market, and that European imports of Russian gas are growing and can only continue to grow. This supposedly places the EU in a dangerous state of dependency and compromises its strategic position towards Russia. All sides of the debate over Europe’s Russia policy share these premises, including those “realists” who argue that dependency on Russian gas makes it irresponsible for the EU to pursue policies that antagonise Moscow. But the conventional wisdom is wrong: Europe’s gas supply is not dominated by Russia, or, for that matter, by any other exporter.
Regular readers know that we just can't resist stories that start out "Conventional wisdom...", because CW is almost invariably wrong. It was wrong about shale and it's definitely wrong on Russia: Jonathan Stern has said so in any number of places and so has Peter Voser CEO of Shell in a widely ignored speech three weeks ago that we think has to be tattooed under the eyelids of energy reporters:
The U.K.'s fears of over reliance on imports of natural gas in the future are overdone because supply of the fuel will remain ample and secure, said Royal Dutch Shell PLC Chief Executive Peter Voser Tuesday.
The focus of the U.K.'s fears - supply from Russia - made up less than 5% of total supply in 2008 and will be a similar proportion in 2020, he said. Shipments of liquefied natural gas and pipeline imports from Norway will be a much larger proportion of U.K. supply, he said.
"The U.K.'s energy challenge is acute. This raises the question why it can afford to dismiss natural gas as a future source of energy
Back to Pierre Noel's piece from last year:
93.5% of the energy consumed in Europe is covered by sources other than Russian gas – and natural gas, unlike oil, faces direct competition from other fuels and technologies.
And of course as we highlighted last week, about 15% of UK electricity supply is directly dependent on Russian coal imports (!), but coal for some bizarre reason isn't considered a threat.
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