Europe gas storage reserves – by country, updated daily

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2022-09-07/debates/9AFA9...

What if the people not paying decide that, since they are not paying, they might as well use as much as possible?

All it would take is a charismatic populist to come along and to promote such a thing for any reserves to be gone.

I am not sure that having LNG ports makes much difference if you have a minor currency such as Sterling and you have to just print more of it to pay for LNG. Other customers might have a manufacturing base or lots of gold, which would trump paper money.

Germany has never had significant gas production and is heavily gas dependent so has built up storage facilities for strategic reasons.

The mistake made was that since 2004, the UK has become a gas importer with a greater fraction of imports every year. There was then a series of judgements made by successive governments that:

1) Gas was only a bridge fuel from which the UK would move away over time

2) The UK network is also essentially directly coupled into the Norwegian gas system which is and was massive

3) The UK has proportionately a very large amount of LNG terminal capacity

Therefore it was decided that it was not necessary either to develop more storage capacity nor indeed to pay for the re-completion of Rough in order to keep it operating. This now seems to have been a serious error.

This is particularly true because:

1) The UK, like The Netherlands, is almost entirely gas heated, Germany is also heavily gas dependent but heating mixes vary across European countries by a lot more than most people appreciate. This is because the UK and The Netherlands discovered gas early and gas is a brilliant heating fuel (apart from the whole global warming thing...). Norway, which discovered gas in large quantities only after it had already built hydro infrastructure and invested in electric heating, doesn't use much gas for heating domestically.

2) The UK has a lot of renewables and very little hydro and has therefore developed over the last decade into a gas + renewables electrical grid and closed its coal power plants. The great wave of nuclear AGR shutdowns has barely started but the Magnoxes are mostly offline already. Other European countries have kept their coal plants around either in daily use or on standby and are therefore able to bring them back. The GB grid simply doesn't have much idled but non-demolished coal capacity left on it.

3) Although, unlike most EU power markets, the GB electricity market is not pure "energy only" and has a capacity market, like those markets, electricity is priced at the marginal cost which in most hours is set by gas generation.

So the UK gets a double whammy of gas price effects.

I guess that could all be calculated and presented and give us an idea. The looming threat is Russia not giving us any of their gas now, other sources are "safe", so I guess that's the baseline: How long can we go without Russian gas?

> And an unqualified time answer - say one month, for example - would be meaningless as the rate of gas consumption is highly seasonal at various scales (daily, weekly, annually). A winter month is not equal to a summer month for example.

That's why I discerned between "average consumption days" and "timeframe from now on / day x on".

Europe didnt make enough hay while the sun was shining.

I don't know when countries typically shift from economic conflict to kinetic conflict, but I hope that Russian intelligence isn't dumb/arrogant enough to assume that transition has zero probability.

They are too entangled at this point for either to survive the collapse of another.

>but it has shown itself to be an unreliable supply

Russia is using gas to try and keep Europe out of the conflict. Once the war ends that ceases to be a motivator. Thus I assume they will turn the taps back on. That doesn't mean we want to rely on it which is the whole point of the question. Victory in Ukraine doesn't end this, so what's the end game. Is there going to be a further push for renewables? Gas from other sources? What's the time frames?

I won't say that good things have come from this war, but it certainly is a wake-up call for countries to get their future plans in better order.

There is simply no excuse for the most industrially advanced country in the world (Germany) to have slacked off so much when it comes to energy. It must be some political angle, because not too many years ago Germany was one of the leaders in expanding their renewable energy sources.

France here... Seeing how things were turning in May I turned my open fireplace into a closed one (way better efficiency) and ordered metric shit-tons of dry wood (I've now got enough for at least two years). Thankfully my house ain't using natural gas at all so at least I'm dodging that one problem. Now electricity may be rationed this winter: dunno, we'll see. But at least I won't be dying of cold.

Heating oneself burning wood has this advantage that it's stone-agey enough: chop a tree into smaller pieces, let them dry for a year, you can heat now heat your house during winter.

And nobody can "ration" me / prevent me from putting wood in the fireplace: that's the "stone age" part of it. The main french electricity company, on the other hand, is ran by state apparatchiks and if they decided to ration electricity (because, by "chance", half of the nuclear reactors are all simultaneously down), I'm pretty much sorry out of luck.

Overall I'm pretty disappointed by the EU (I'm an EU citizen) and plan to GTFO. I tried last year but it failed (residency was hard to obtain where I tried to go) but I'll very probably try again.