The Russia has once again become Europe’s leading gas supplier. The reports it Financial Times analyzing the data relating to May supplies. For the first time in two years, Russian gas has surpassed US gas, whose supplies by ship are in liquefied form have increased dramatically after the invasion of Ukraine. The British newspaper notes how the reversal shows the difficulty of the old continent in reducing its dependence on Russian gas, with several Eastern European countries still massively dependent on imports from Moscow.
Although flows through gas pipelines have reduced, many cargoes of (more expensive) LNG also arrive from Russia. According to data from Icis (Independent commodity intelligence service), despite the sanctions (very modest as regards gas, ed), LNG shipments from Russia accounted for last month 15% of the total supply to the EU, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia. The liquefied gas coming from United States instead stopped at 14% of supply to the region, marking the lowest level since August 2022. The main users of LNG are France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium.
According to Icis analysts, the situation should still be only contingent and do not last long. May flows were indeed affected by several one-time factors, including an outage at a major US LNG export facility. Russia instead sent more gas through Turkey ahead of pipeline maintenance scheduled for June.
In 2019, last “normal” year before the war and pandemic, Russia exported gas worth around 50 billion dollars a year while oil exports are worth almost 190 billion. Russia is the first country in the world for gas reserves and the third for crude oil reserves.
