Europe finds itself in quite a predicament as Russia has supplied Europe’s natural gas for many many years which they use for a variety of reasons from generating electricity to heating the buildings. This has made it harder for the U.S to install stricter sanctions on Russia. Europe wants to cut off Russia to support Ukraine but it actually hurts Europe more than it hurts Russia. The reason is that Europe really doesn’t make that much money off of gas as most of their profit comes from oil. If Russia goes ahead and cuts off supply because Europe is supporting Ukraine then that would infuriate Europe to the point where WWIII could be in play. We can always reroute the oil market and avoid Russia but we cannot avoid the gas. Gas is much much harder to transport and that is the main reason why. The article describes this as, “The underlying driver of this is insufficient gas storage. Last summer, we didn’t refill storage in Europe very quickly, and people just panicked. They panicked because they thought they were not going to make it through the winter. Now, at no point has there been an actual physical shortage of gas. It’s all been forecasts of a shortage. And at some point the market broke, because once prices got crazy, nobody wanted to buy gas in July to store until December, when gas is at its highest prices ever.”
https://nowcomment.com/documents/309586
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/02/why-europe-cant-shut-off-russian-gas/622925/
