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

Abstract. Russia is the largest natural gas supplier to the EU. The invasion of Ukraine was followed by a cut-off of gas supplies from Russia to many EU countries, and the EU is planning to ban or dramatically reduce its dependence from Russia. We provide a dataset of daily gas consumption in five sectors (household and public buildings heating, power, industry, and other sectors) with supply source shares in the EU27 & UK from 2016 to 2022. The dataset separates the contributions of Russian gas imports, and other supply sources, and accounts for storage to estimate consumption. The dataset was developed with a gas network flow simulation model based on mass flow balance by combining data from multiple datasets including daily ENTSO-G pipelines gas transport and storage, ENTSO-E daily power production from gas, and Eurostat monthly gas consumption statistics per sector. The annual consumption data was validated against BP Statistical Review of World Energy and Eurostat datasets. We secondly analysed 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 US, and Australia from either pipelines or LNG imports, accounting for existing capacities. Our results indicate that it should be theoretically possible for the EU to make up collectively for a sudden shortfall of Russian gas if combining the four solutions together, provided a perfect collaboration between EU countries and with the UK to redistribute gas from countries with surplus to those with deficits. Further analyses are required to investigate the implications for the costs including social, economic, and institutional dimensions, political barriers, and negative impacts on climate policies with inevitable increases of CO2 emissions if the use of coal is ramped up in the power sector.