Russia has once again become Europe’s largest gas supplier. This is reported by the 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 in liquefied form have increased dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine.
The British newspaper notes that 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.
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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, last month LNG shipments from Russia represented 15% of the total supply to the EU, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and North Macedonia. North.
Liquefied gas from the United States instead stopped at 14% of the 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 however only be contingent and 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, the last normal year before the war and pandemic, Russia exported gas worth around 50 billion dollars a year while oil exports were worth almost 190 billion. Russia is the first country in the world for gas reserves and the third for crude oil reserves.
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