Here in Lithuania we were already independent from Russian gas and oil (lesson learned over the decades), and had liquid natural gas terminal for a few years. But inflation is also very high.
Thing is even if you're not using Russian gas directly, prices are still going to be influenced by the global gas market (and the wider global economy in general).
Other oil has gone up so much because everyone is switching off Russian oil. Russian oil is not going up. So it's actually not a bad time to be a Russian oil consumer...
Russian oil and gas should actually be cheaper because demand has dropped sharply.
Anyway it's a very bad time to be a Russian oil consumer, because you'll be funding an unprovoked invasion and the countries that have sanctioned Russia may not want to deal with you.
> Russian oil and gas should actually be cheaper because demand has dropped sharply. [...] because you'll be funding an unprovoked invasion and the countries that have sanctioned Russia may not want to deal with you.
An alternative view is that Russian oil and gas is not cheaper, but that it has extra costs which are not directly reflected on its official price. If you could put a number on the "moral cost" (funding an unprovoked invasion) and the "pariah risk" (other countries might not want to deal with you anymore if you buy Russian oil), and add that number to the official price of Russian oil and gas, there's a good chance that the result is exactly the price you get for non-Russian oil and gas on the global market.
It's easy for small country like Lithuania, but completely impossible for country like Germany. There is not enough gas without Russian one to feed its industry.
>but completely impossible for country like Germany. There is not enough gas without Russian one to feed its industry.
Huh, if only they could have invested enough in their local energy sector, through I don't know ... NUCLEAR!, to keep their industry energy independent of Russia, and not shut down its few remaining nukes in the middle of an energy crisis just to appease an outdated political ideology like an absolute dunce, causing energy prices across EU to further skyrockets as Germany had to compensate its internal deficit by buying from the rest.
There's a reason people undeservingly vented their frustration on Germany at Eurovision this year.
> NUCLEAR!, to keep their industry energy independent of Russia
The world (EU and US included) is heavily dependent on Russian nuclear imports and technology. Here is an in-depth article on why this is so difficult to overcome:
People like you look at these things as if you just shift numbers around on an excel sheet. There is still physics and geography involved here. German industry is already hardly competitive in terms of price, what do you think happens when those raw materials are 10 times more expensive?
Now there is a price crunch for LNG tanker charters further pushing up prices. Also it's so disingenuous. Indians are now refining Russian oil, selling it back to Europe but Eurocrats and lying politicians get to pretend they're going off hydrocarbons.
With oil the solution is trivial. Switch to electrical cars while generating electricity for them with modern efficient coal plants using German coal. Not only it will be cheaper and reduce geopolitical risks, but it will drop CO2 emission as well.
Let me complete that sentence for you.... after Finland refused to pay in rubels because the signed gas import-export contract specified other currencies.
It is possible within few years. Most of the gas is used for heating. Switch that to heat pumps. Then for electricity to run those pumps upgrade the existing coal power stations to the latest technology that gives 45% efficiency from the existing stations with 30-35%.
But does it require big (or deep) fields for heat exchange?
I mean, lets take a 20-story building, the amount of heating energy it consumes is really high, especially during winters. So you probably would need a soccer-field size heat exchanger in order for the heat to be extracted from the ground.
I bet it will also use quite a lot of electricity to compress the transporting liquid.
It's completely possible for Germany, if you accept that it will completely impoverish your population and irreparably destroy the Mittelstand(which is most of Germany's industry), which stands at the crux of the German welfare system.
> Here in Lithuania we were already independent from Russian gas and oil
Is that a fact? I know that Lithuania doesn't buy Russian oil and gas directly, but it always seemed to me that it is still the same Russian oil and gas, just through an intermediate supplier.