Europe sweats over the future of Russia’s gas supply.

The invasion of Ukraine on February 24 and the nearly five months of war that have followed have reminded many European countries of the stark reality of their energy dependence on Russia. For ten days, western Europe has sweated on the resumption of gas supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline into Germany, which Russia closed down on July 11 for maintenance. Many in Berlin and Brussels feared it would not come back online as scheduled after the outage.

The flow of gas has resumed – but fears remain that the volume of supply will be far smaller than before. Even before the supply was shut down in order to send one of the turbines for repair in Canada, the gas flow was reportedly 60% below peak flow levels.

European countries are struggling to fill their energy reserves ahead of next winter, which could be a very difficult one with high energy prices and emergency measures to reduce energy demand and consumption. The Paris-based intergovernmental International Energy Agency (IEA) has encouraged European leaders to “do all they can right now to prepare for a long, hard winter”. It has proposed a programme for a more coordinated, EU-wide approach spanning from minimising gas usage in the power sector to bringing down household electricity demand.

At EU level, the European Commission is calling on member states to prepare for a “sizeable risk” of a complete halt of Russian gas supplies. The EU has legislation in place, such as the 2017 Gas Security of Supply Regulation, which should help navigating these uncertain times – but it will be interesting to see if the regulation will stand the test of an energy crunch.