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independent of Russia, and not shut down its few remaining nukes in the middle of an energy crisis just to appease an outdated political ideology like an absolute dunce, causing energy prices across EU to further skyrockets as Germany had to compensate its internal deficit by buying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.
Didn't EU freeze all Russian dollar accounts? That basically means Russia never gets those dollar payments. Why would it keep delivering gas for free? Does that "contract" even mean anything then? By switching to rubles Russia actually helped EU nations with a legal way to keep paying for gas.
Most of the European companies adopted the new scheme within their current contracts, so it was a technical thing. Russia just needed to be paid in currency that can not be stolen by some lunatic government.
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.
As I understood, drilling deep is quite expensive and, comparing to centralized heating stations working with gas for instance, the thermal output does not allow building heat factories. In example they state that they needed 8 500-meter holes for 4 houses and only 64 apts. So they are talking about typical Scandinavian 4-floor buildings, which are as well A-class insulated.
It stands nowhere near to typical buildings of East Berlin for instance.
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.
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.