Did you notice how for the last few months the noise from the online doom prophets has silenced entirely. When natural gas prices were at 350 EUR/MWh everyone was an economics expert. Europe was finished! Russia was winning! Europe will freezeeee! Oh no!
Take a look at todays prices. Ill bet anything that you probably had no idea that the MWH prices were at pre-war prices. The discussion about the collapse of society simply fizzled out, everyone forgot about it and pointed their outrage elsewhere. The contrarian extremist influencers got their engagement and the people got to yell at something.
That is extremism for you.
When its going their way for a short amount of time they yell really, really hard.
...and when they are ultimately wrong they just kind of sneak away in silence. Hope no one noticed so they can do more idiotic yelling when the moment suits them again.
Extremism is easy as you dont really need to care about accountability, the truth, objectivity. I mean, youre already an extremist, by definition you dont care about those things otherwise you would not be one.
Due to Russias invasion of Ukraine, Europe is slowly but surely getting off of Russian energy. Germany replaced almost all of it with gas from Netherlands, Norway and USA.
Russians have played their hand and their energy blackmail has lost all its potency.
As it stands now, Russia simply has no way to replace the export going towards EU nations. I know people might say:
Well, they will just sell it to a country that will sell it to EU. Derp
See, thats not how anything works. Natural gas isnt a cryptocurrency that you can just send it across the planet at will in amounts you wish. You need to have infrastructure in place, you need capacity. There is a reason there are so many of those black lines on the map above going from Russia to Europe.
The Russians simply do not have adequate infrastructure to move the gas elsewhere. The same pipelines from their main gas field that supplied Europe will probably take 20+ years to build towards China and China already prefers to get its gas from Central Asia and Australia.
To move that amount via LNG Russia would need more LNG ships then exist on the planet.
Russia is basically fucked. It will enter isolation for at least 5-15 years curtesy of their dictator extraordinaire.
Russia accounts for about 2-3% of Worlds GDP. The collective "West" contributes more than 50% of the worlds GDP.
This was never a fight Russia was going to win.
Only the collective delusion of the extreme rightwingers, leftists and faux-libertarian grifters in Europe and USA combined with the corruption driven lies and Putins misplaced hopes of restoring the USSR are why we are even here in the first place.
Extremism in all forms only leads to bad and stupid decisions that eventually bite you in the ass.
Winter was very mild.
Thats part of it.
I know, been living though it :D
Will be a lot of early mosquitos next season.
Yeah, hate that.
Same, same. I hate the thought of those snorkels under my skin -_-
Your chart doesn't actually show gas prices back to pre-war levels. That blue dotted line is still way above average 2020-2021 levels.
It is not correct that the "collective West" represents more than 50% of world GDP.
It is less than 40% and dropping. The fastest growing economies are all outside the collective West. Notably Japan is buying Russian oil and gas.
Russia's oil and gas revenues are up and its economy is doing well.
While you are right that it takes time to rebuild energy supply infrastructure to shift supply routes eastwards, once this work is done the EU will forever be deprived of the cheap Russian energy that was the lifeblood of its manufacturing industry and prosperity.
How so? War started February 2022, price was 87 Euros at the time. Its 55 Eur today. Its a price point, im not comparing averages. Year just started. Last time it traded at this level was mid 2021.
It is pretty much correct. USA is at about 25%, Eu 22%, add to that UK, Canada and other anti-russian partners Australia, Japan, etc. You get above 50%.
Its not. There is a projected GDP drop of between 3-6% and sanctions take time since EU nations were in one way or another buying Russian oil and gas throughout 2022.
And that ofc was when prices were at 350 Eur, now they are at prewar levels and a market for the gas coming out of their main gas field simply does not exist.
Ofc, the future depends on how EU will deal with the situation. The worst is definitely behind us. Russia had a hand to play, they played it and lost.
This is partially true.... The Netherlands have been the 1st nation to adopt natural gas in Europe, more than 100 years ago, and set a lot of standards for it, mostly because they found a NG source on their territory ... but this source is almost depleted now, and they are almost non producer .... what they have though is CNG terminals for ships to unload the gas... import infrastructure.... the top image with the price is from the TTF exchange in Netherlands, the main trading hub in EU.
Norway does have some NG in the seas, but still not enough.
The US are sending ships to Europe, but this is very market driven, if prices are better in Japan or China, the ships will go there.
Recently Germany signed an agreement with Qatar, that is the number one producer for NG in the world .... and this is huge... not sure about the quantities though.
One very important thing in the Germany NG infrastructure are the HUGE gas storages they have, and have added new ones in the last year, that give them a lot of flexibility to balance the demand.
And for the end, this winter has been a blessing for the EU with the hot weather, and the storages have remained full above 70%, that is crazy for this time of the year, and basically there is excess gas all over the place.
Countries all went with the worst case scenario, inflating prices massively and indeed now that the winter is quite warm, those buffers are very useful in bringing down the price
I was looking at the charts showing origin of gas compared to prewar numbers for Germany. That is what it shows atm.
How everything will unfold moving forward depends on their efforts, some that you mentioned here. Necessity always breeds action.
Well adding more storages and getting gas from Qatar and US is probably one of the most tangible things Germany has made.
Exactly, it's a very mild winter and people have been trimming down their usage to 80% of last year. Germany has a law in place that guarantees that energy prices 2023 will be the same as in 2022 for private households that remain below 80% of their previous year's consumption.
Its human nature to fear what we dont understand, many ppl thought the world was ending during the pandemic, but also humans tend to look for solutions, there was a logistics issue and got solved, gas prices slowly goes down
Some people never consider the fact that some problems are solvable.
doom 2023 still on. this is just a break
Remind me in 2024. lol
isolation always leads to defeat. lets hope the end of the war will come to an end soon !!
I think we should know how the war will unfold in the next few months going into summer.
it is hard to freeze when average temperatures are high above 0 :)
i read an interesting tweet by an nuclear power defender about Germany shutting down nuclear power plants. "people need to be lucky every winter, winter needs to be lucky only once"
True. haha
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