US President Joe Biden’s plan to send more natural gas to Europe to replace that region’s dependence on Russian fuel faces some practical obstacles today, The New York Times reported.
The US president and the president of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, announced this Friday a joint working group to reduce the purchase of this hydrocarbon from Russia as part of the West’s attack against Moscow for its military operation in Ukraine.
As reported by the White House, this team will seek to guarantee additional volumes of liquefied natural gas for the European Union (EU) market of at least 15 billion cubic meters in 2022, an amount that could increase in the future.
According to the New York newspaper, this plan “will be largely symbolic, at least in the short term” because the United States does not have sufficient capacity to export more and Europe does not have the logistics to import a significantly larger amount.
In recent months, the Times noted, US exporters have increased output at terminals that convert gas into a liquid for easy transportation in large tankers and diverted shipments originally destined for Asia to Europe.
However, experts told the outlet that building terminals on both sides of the Atlantic to expand the exchange could take two to five years, so that reality is likely to limit the scope of Biden and von der Leyen’s announcement.
In addition, specialists warn of the impact of the purchase of fossil-based energy in the United States on policies to combat climate change, although these concerns apparently took a back seat in an effort to avoid income for the Russian economy.
Obviously, they did not think about how much that can influence the increase in fuel prices for Europeans, who until now acquired 40 percent of the gas used in the Eurasian country, and now they will buy it much more expensively in the North American market.
This week the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, stated that they will continue to supply their natural gas to countries with hostile behavior in the quantities and prices established in the contracts, but they will begin to collect those transactions in rubles.
