For four days running, Russia has been in the news following its invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin had ordered wide-ranging attacks on Ukraine on Thursday, hitting several cities and bases with airstrikes and attacking by land and sea.
According to media reports, there has already been a lot of casualties on both sides, with Russia still advancing into Ukraine. Some reports say 198 deaths have been recorded so far and 1000 people wounded.
But while the world continues to hope and pray for a cease-fire, with the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada imposing sanctions on Russia and Putin, a report by Carbon Brief has shown that the invasion is disrupting global energy supplies.
According to the report, Russia is a major part of the global energy system because of its huge fossil fuel resources. With the invasion, there have also been widespread fears that climate action could be relegated to the background by world leaders.
Russia is said to be the world’s third-largest oil producer after the US and Saudi Arabia, accounting for 12% of global output and the second-largest gas producer after the US, responsible for 17% of the global output.
The report showed that Russian energy supplies are particularly important in Europe, which receives around 70% of the country’s gas exports and half of its oil exports, according to official US data.
The report also showed that the rest of Russia’s gas exports go to Belarus (8%), China (5%), Kazakhstan (s5%), Japan (4%) and other parts of Eurasia, Asia and Oceania. Its remaining oil exports go to China (31%), South Korea (6%), Belarus (6%), Japan (2%), the US (1%) and other parts of Eurasia, Asia and Oceania.
According to the report produced with charts, analysis and commentary on what Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means for energy, commodities and, ultimately, climate action, more than a third of Europe’s gas supplies come from Russia.
It showed that while Europe is heavily reliant on Russian fuel supplies, Russia, in turn, depends on revenues from fossil fuel sales, which make up more than two-fifths of government revenue, with the UK, EU and the US collectively spending more than $700m a day buying Russian oil and gas.
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In a separate piece reported by the New York Times, the European Union has received nearly 40% of its gas and more than a quarter of its oil from Russia, over the past three decades.
The report showed that while some countries, such as Poland and France, have decreased their dependence on Russian fuel over this time, others, such as Germany and Italy, have become more reliant, according to New York Times analysis using Eurostat data.
Some publications have also speculated on the risk that the Ukraine crisis could disrupt gas supplies to Europe, either as collateral damage from conflict or via a political move from Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Comments from Shell are already warning that Europe needs to “make urgent reforms to address the vulnerability of its gas supplies”.
German chancellor Olaf Scholz had said on Tuesday that gas accounted for a quarter of the country’s energy mix, with more than half of it coming from Russia.
The report further showed that the UK is much less reliant on oil and gas from Russia than the European Union, with the country sourcing less than 5% of its gas from Russian imports, instead of relying largely on dwindling North Sea reserves and supply from Norway.
A Reuters report on Thursday showed that Spanish and Portuguese officials had called for Europe to coordinate managing its energy supplies after Russia’s invasion “heightened fears of disruption”.
In a detailed Twitter thread, an associate professor of international politics at the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies at Ghent University, Belgium, Prof Thijs Van De Graaf examined the risk that Russia will “turn off the gas taps” to Europe.
He said that Russia could afford to cut gas supplies, noting that Russia earns five times more from the export of oil than gas and that it holds $630bn in foreign reserves.
“Despite this, it is “highly unlikely” that Russia will cut gas supplies to “Gazprom’s biggest customers in Europe”, he was quoted as saying. “Russia cannot simply switch its gas exports to, say, China since it lacks the pipeline infrastructure,”.
Reacting to the risk of warfare disrupting supplies, he pointed out that most gas transit pipelines do not run through the Donbass region, an area central to the conflict in south-eastern Ukraine.
Story was adapted from Carbon Brief.
