It is high time for the EU to end its energy disarmament

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BrusselsReport.eu
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By Samuel Furfari, formerly a senior official at the Energy Directorate-General of the European Commission (1982-2018), Professor em. at Université libre de Bruxelles and President of the European Society for Engineers and Industrialists

The strategic error made by the European Union in the field of energy is now obvious to many for several years already. Cleverly, the EU had put ‘all its eggs in one basket’ and is now paying dearly for its unilateral energy disarmament. In October 2000, Romano Prodi’s Commission, with Loyola de Palacio in charge of energy, called for diversification of energy sources in its Green Paper on the security of energy supply, meaning diversification was needed when it comes to import countries, transport means and routes.

Then, the EU’s primary energy balance was well balanced, with about one third oil, one quarter natural gas and the rest fairly well distributed between nuclear, coal and renewable energies. All was fine and well, until Brussels and Strasbourg decided on energy disarmament. Indeed, today’s EU policy makers have decreed that energy policy must be subsidiary to climate policy, and that therefore, all energy sources must be rapidly renewable.

A testimony of this is the European Parliament’s demand to stop financing gas interconnections. The promised future will soon be green and bright, so why spend money on unnecessary pipelines? Some tolerance would have been allowed if the purpose of the pipeline had been to transport utopian hydrogen. Is this the success of the German lobby that wanted to import hydrogen from Russia? Russian hydrogen produced from Russian gas, of course!

However, then came the reckoning, and Germany itself is nearing bankruptcy, because of its «EnergieWende», and it does not know how to get through this winter. Only 6% of the gas burned in Germany is used in power plants. Most of it is used to heat homes, in a country that goes through cold winters, and to supply factories with a crucial need for thermal energy.

As a result, the German government is now broadcasting TV commercials explaining to the incredulous population how to tape up the doors of rooms they won’t have to use this winter and how to wash dishes with cold water.

The EU’s response so far

How to overcome this impasse? One could take a cue from the past. Following the interruption of gas supplies from Russia to Ukraine on 1 January 2006 and again on 1 January 2009, Slovakia was left without gas for several days. Solidarity mechanisms had to be found to avoid similar crises in the future. In response, the EU financed the ‘reverse flow’ which, by reversing the entry and exit of compressors, allowed gas to flow from west to east as well. This is also what is happening today with Ukraine, which is being supplied, as it can no longer rely on supplies from Russia.

To stimulate cooperation on this topic, the Lisbon Treaty also introduced Article 122 TFEU, which provides for solidarity between member states and ends with the phrase ‘in particular in the field of energy’.

To help Germany get through the coming winter, the European Commission proposed in June 2022 that EU member states voluntarily decide, and if necessary this would become a binding obligation, to limit natural gas consumption by 15 per cent to help countries with gas shortages.

However, given that it is an objective fact that the German greens have neglected to diversify Russian gas supplies and have even managed to convince Germany not to build even a single gas terminal that would be able to import LNG from international markets, it is not surprising that, like in Aesop’s story of the Ant and the Grasshopper, Portugal, Spain, Greece, France and Italy (see Minister Cingolani’s letter to Vice-President Frans Timmermans) made it clear – in diplomatic terms – that they would not ask their citizens to sacrifice themselves to help the Germans, who are mainly responsible for this energy crisis.

Some sort of compromise was then reached by the Czech EU presidency, which managed to get governments to agree that aid to countries in difficulty would be on a voluntary basis, however with numerous exceptions and various loopholes, including the fact that the country has a sufficient surplus and that there is the physical possibility of transferring gas to the member state with a shortage.

Who could have a gas surplus gas to transfer abroad? Spain? This country built its first LNG terminal in the port of Barcelona in 1969 and to date, it has seven on the peninsula and another one on the island of Tenerife, including one in Gijon (Asturias) that has not even been inaugurated because the market is well supplied. The rest of the gas comes from Algeria via two pipelines. Spain’s diversification policy is in line with the strategy advocated by Prodi and de Palacio. Yet, despite being able to count on diversified supplies, not even a country like Spain can come to Germany’s rescue. And not because it does not want to show solidarity, but because solidarity has not existed in the past.

France continues to object to a new interconnection from Spain

During the summit on energy interconnections in March 2015, the President of France, the Prime Ministers of Spain and Portugal, and the President of the European Commission issued a joint statement that they agreed on «the need to actively asses in order to complete the Eastern gas axis between Portugal, Spain and France, allowing bidirectional flows between the Iberian Peninsula and France through a new interconnection project currently known as the MIDCAT.»

The missing 190 km between the Iberian Peninsula and France would have allowed Spanish LNG terminals to supply Germany, at least partially. As the person responsible for Spain at the European Commission at the time, I prepared briefings for at least three EU Commissioners when they met to discuss the MidCat with the French, because both Spain and the Commission were determined to ensure a good security of energy supply and this interconnection would have made it possible, as we are regrettably witnessing today.

At the time, France objected, because the French government considered it to be unacceptable for the two French LNG terminals to compete with the Spanish ones, given their large number. And the other Member States, including Germany, why did they not push for the construction of this pipeline? Were they not interested? Where did the concept of solidarity go? Only now Olaf Scholz is pushing for a rapid construction of the Midcat, but Macron’s France opposes it, arguing that there is no need to build an additional pipeline to the current ones. Perhaps if Germany would pay all or part of the 3 billion euro which is needed for its construction, while providing guarantees to France, the latter would be more flexible? Once again, where has the concept of solidarity gone?

The lack of European solidarity

In sum, it is clear that Germany and the European Commission should not expect southern Europe to sacrifice itself for German environmentalists. Nor should they expect solidarity from Hungary, whose foreign minister went to Moscow on 21 July to negotiate and obtain additional Russian gas supplies. The visit came just days after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared that the EU had made a mistake by imposing sanctions on Russia.

This all makes clear that the energy emergency is much more concrete than the climate emergency and therefore, it also needs to be dealt with more quickly.

So what is the solution? The objective of a critical analysis of the facts is not to make people feel guilty, but rather to identify the causes, so that they can be remedied. The current European Commission, unlike Prodi’s, has opted for energy masochism. It is true that the crisis in Ukraine is exacerbating this problem, but it was not Vladimir Putin who caused the crisis into which Germany and the European Commission have plunged us. Energy prices started their upward trajectory as early as 2021.

Fortunately, apart from Germany, there no rationing in the rest of the EU is expected, due to a rather diversified energy mix. Will the Germans, on the other hand, who have been pushing for the march towards solar and wind energy, be able to cope with the consequences?

Crises are solved by changing, not by persevering in error and failure.  Last month, at the Cernobbio conference, wind and solar energy were  once again the main focus. Do people not know that, after 49 years, these energy sources have only reached a measly 3 percent of the EU’s primary energy supply, at the cost of billions of euros in subsidies, legislative obligations and degradation of the landscape?

The EU urgently needs to explicitly rehabilitate natural gas. Methane, abundant in the world and present on all continents, is the thermal energy for domestic, industrial and petrochemical use of this century.

Originally published in Italian by Rienergia

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