“It wasn’t a big blow, Europe was ready to cut off Russian gas supplies,” energy expert Archil Mamatelashvili said in an interview with “Business Course.” According to him, the alternative to Russian gas for Europe is liquefied natural gas, which it mainly receives from the US and Norway. As he notes, European countries also have sufficient gas reserves, so the cutoff of Russian gas will not have a big impact on them.
According to the energy expert, Russia will receive a loss of USD 5 billion from leaving the European market. However, the Russian energy giant Gazprom suffered a much larger loss in 2022, when European countries began to replace Russian natural gas.
“Europe was ready for this. There are several reasons why this will not greatly impact Europe. First of all, the scale was not large, moreover, natural gas importers were mainly replaced by LNG (liquefied natural gas). 30% of LNG imports account for Norway, as well as the USA.
Europe has solved a lot of problems by the end of 2022 related to gas supplies. Today, natural gas supplies in Europe are quite large, even the Ukrainian gas storage capacity is at a record high,” says Archil Mamatelashvili.
