Silk Road Reporters: Can Turkmen Gas Disrupt Gazprom’s EU Market?

Ever since Russia’s March 2014 annexation of Crimea, both European Union politicians and NATO officials have muttered darkly about the EU’s reliance on Russian energy imports, which could result in being blackmailed by Moscow.

While the EU is currently reliant on Russian energy imports, its policy that’s been decades in the making, and significant shifts currently remain far in the future. Currently About 39% of the EU’s natural gas imports are supplied by Russia’s state monopoly Gazprom, with another 33% supplied from Norway and a further 22% from North Africa. In the wake of last year’s Ukraine crisis, EU energy experts suddenly fretted that the EU’s over-dependence on Russia could expose Europe both to Kremlin threats and higher prices. According to Gazprom, in 2013 Germany, Poland and fellow NATO member Turkey were the biggest importers of Russian gas in Europe, with Russian gas imports accounting for about 44% of Germany’s annual consumption.

The dependency is not evenly shared; EU and NATO former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, along with EU and NATO members Bulgaria, Slovakia as well as the EU’s Finland depend on Russia for 100 percent of their natural gas imports. EU and NATO members Greece and the Czech Republic import 70 percent of their natural gas from Russia, while EU and NATO member states Germany, and Poland along with EU member Austria depend on Russian gas for just under half of their annual usage. The EU need for natgas imports is hardly surprising, given Europe’s relative paucity of natural gas supplies; in contrast, Russia has the world’s largest natural gas reserves, estimated at 48 trillion cubic meters (tcm).

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