| I think your take for solving this is somewhat wrong. The big issue isn't gas for electricity (only around 14% of gas in Germany is used for electricity) but gas for heating as well as industry, fertilizer and the likes. This means the steps to solving this should begin with addressing those: - Move heating systems away from gas (and oil). Heat Pumps are probably the best way moving forward. - Moving the industry of gas and oil. Parts can probably be somewhat easily electrified, but parts like fertilizer and other chemical production probably should be converted to hydrogen. (Hydrogen generated from electricity, not gas, since that's a bit useless) This means quite a bit more need for electricity where some of your proposals come in: - Building nuclear power plants. Will probably take >15 years, so probably not helping much. Extending the runtime of existing plants might help, but I'm not sure how much. - More coal. Will likely work. Capital costs are likely too high to use them instead of gas plants for filling gaps in renewable supply instead of investing in storage. Some further important steps: - Massive expansion of renewables. Very cheap and possible intermittency issues are likely not as important for producing hydrogen and gas. With sufficient overproduction and interconnection in europe the need for storage can be greatly reduced. - Storage including Power to Gas. Meshes well with renewables. Especially Power-to-Gas will benefit from existing, then less used, infrastructure. In general, LNG terminals are likely very helpful, especially for the next few years and high energy prices are probably going to happen. I doubt that Russia can wean itself of Europe that easily. China won't be able to (fully) fill the gap (around 70% of russian gas is exported to europe) and is likely not that interested on heavily depending on foreign energy. LNG terminals are also very limited in capacity compared to pipelines and with europe switching more to LNG terminals a lot of new ships need to be built. Furthermore, if europe is successful in weaning off of fossil fuels, other countries are likely also going to reduce the need for gas due to scaling and learning effects (Renewables, especially solar, have seen huge cost reductions in the last 20 years and are killing of coal plants in Australia and electric cars are very likely going to kill of combustion engine cars in the next 10 years). It's going to be very hard for both. |