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by gadders 1354 days ago
Is it me, or does he skirt over Europe not working increasing the supply of gas locally? I'm not saying they could replace Russia or the US, but they could almost certainly produce more (whether via fracking or whatever).
3 comments

They could also import from North Africa - Spain does it, Germany wants a pipeline, but France is inbetween these two and blocks such initiatives to try to keep a future for their failing nuclear industry (even if 50% of it is offline), under various fake pretenses.

It looks like a catastrophe in the making, and public opinion about say fracking or support for war sanctions might change when say grandmas start making the news for freezing to death due to prices/blackouts etc.

Fracking probably takes awhile to get started...also geological European conditions are not great for that. I do wonder why the Dutch won't reopen the Groningen gas field. Yes earthquakes I know but this is a real crisis.
I also believe they could get all the gas they ever wanted by building a pipeline through Turkey to Turkmenistan. With this disaster of a war ongoing the Turkmen government might be willing to risk playing ball with Europe.
Isn't gas from that part of the world unfit for heating/production/food in the EU? I've read that basically Russia buys it all from those countries for their own specific industry/military purposes and then sends their own gas through their pipelines to export them as those countries' own gas.
No, Russia buys it for a song (since they're the only customer) and uses it domestically and possibly sells it along to Europe. I've certainly never heard of the Turkmen gas being unusable for regular purposes. There's a small pipeline to Afghanistan that supplies the border regions (when its running).
this is incorrect, there is a direct pipeline from Turkmenistan to China who buys about 6x more gas from Turkmenistan than Russia.
You are correct. I wasn't up to date on my Turkmen pipelines. I'm sure the Turkmen would be more than happy to sell to Europe though.
Yes, replacement is possible in years, as the article says.
Most of Europe doesn't have the natural resources to do that.