Natural gas supply from Russia derived from daily pipeline flow data and potential solutions for filling a shortage of Russian supply in the European Union (EU)

Abstract

Russia is the largest natural gas supplier to the European Union (EU). The invasion of Ukraine was followed by a cutoff of gas supplies from Russia to many EU countries, and the EU is planning to ban or drastically reduce its dependence on Russia. We provide a dataset of daily gas consumption in five sectors (household and public building heating, power, industry, and other sectors) with supply source shares in the EU27 (27 EU member countries) and UK from 2016 to 2022. The datasets are available at Zenodo platform: 10.5281/zenodo.7549233 (Zhou et al., 2022). The dataset separates the contributions of Russian imports, liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports, and other supply sources to both direct supply and storage supply for gas consumption estimations. The dataset was developed with a gas network flow simulation model based on mass flow balance by combining data from multiple datasets including daily ENTSOG (European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas) pipeline gas transport and storage, ENTSOE (European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity) daily power production from gas, and Eurostat monthly gas consumption statistics per sector. The annual consumption data were validated against the BP Statistical Review of World Energy and Eurostat datasets. We secondly analyzed the share of gas supplied by Russia in each country to quantify the "gap"that would result from a cessation of all Russian exports to Europe. Thirdly, we collected multiple data sources to assess how national gaps could be alleviated by (1) reducing the demand for heating in a plausible way using the lower envelope of gas empirical consumption - temperature functions, (2) increasing power generation from sources other than gas, (3) transferring gas savings from countries with surplus to those with deficits, and (4) increasing imports from other countries like Norway, the USA, Australia, and northern African countries from either pipelines or LNG imports, accounting for existing capacities. Our results indicate that it should be theoretically possible for the EU to collectively make up for a sudden shortfall of Russian gas by combining the four solutions together, provided a perfect collaboration between EU countries and the UK to redistribute gas from countries with surplus to those with deficits. Further analyses are required to investigate the implications with respect to the costs, including social, economic, and institutional dimensions; political barriers; and negative impacts on climate policies, with inevitable increases in CO2 emissions if the use of coal is ramped up in the power sector.