How the EU decreased gas consumption and dependence on Russia in 2020-2021?
Abstract
Modern world countries’ economies are interconnected via international trade, services, energy supply, demand and transit. So, this means that there exists a scale of economy and if something mistakenly happens, it will spill over the country’s neighbourhood or the whole world.
According to the official statistical data in 2021 the world energy consumption was 595.15 exajoules which increased by 5.2% compared to 2020. In 2021 the share of oil consumption was 31 %, natural gas – 24.4 %, coal – 27 %, nuclear energy - 4.3%, hydroelectric – 6.8 % and renewables – 6.7 %. In fact, the share of hydrocarbon energy consumption was a total of 55.4 % and this means that the world is dependent again on the energy resources by which the world is “ruled” by the main oil and natural gas reserves/producer countries.
As for energy consumer countries, in 2021 top energy consumer EU member countries were Germany with 12.6 %, France – 9.41 %, Italy – 6.4 %, Spain - 5.6 % and Poland – 4.4 %. As for the share of each energy resource in each country’s total energy consumption, Germany consumed 25.8 % of natural gas in its total energy consumption, Italy – 41.1 %, Spain – 21.9 %, Poland 18.8 % and France – 16.5 %.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine mostly caused energy consumption to collapse and food trade challenges in the world since December 24, 2022. But this is not news, in the early years, from 2005-2006 there were gas supply disruptions for EU member countries from the Russian Federation; so, it can be said that EU member countries tried and are still trying to diversify gas consumption via various ways.
The economy is deeply interconnected with political issues. The tragedy is that thousands of people have died in Ukraine.
The aim of the present article is to analyse how these top five E. U. member countries are trying to use renewable energy resources, and diversify with different energy importers, simply, to decrease the mentioned energy consumption, how the war affected them and what their way out is.
