EU now has reached 80%, two months earlier than expected, but the inventory level does not represent the actual usage. We all know that a country's reserves account for only a small part of the actual consumption. Whether the EU can survive this winter is facing great challenges, and the striking natural gas price now will definitely make people complain.
The current Western countries are mainly short of oil in the United States, and European countries represented by Germany are mainly short of natural gas, especially Germany. The natural gas obtained from Norway , Netherlands , Belgium only reaches 83% of the reserves. Winter is coming soon, and Germany has not yet reached its storage target. Europe is now buying American natural gas almost at all costs. The price of natural gas in the European and American markets is 10 times different. A ship of liquefied natural gas costs US$60 million when loading ships in the United States, and US$275 million when disembarking in Europe. In June, the U.S. exported more natural gas to Europe than Russia.
I have a prediction, which is the natural gas game between Europe and Russia. Germany is likely to start using the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at a certain key node, with the sudden easing of relations between Germany and Russia as the end. Why do you say so? If you take your friends to review the two previous situations, you will find that there have always been gaps between NATO countries that can be broken by Russia.
Some time ago, the Fed's interest rate hike caused European capital to flow back to the United States, and the US dollar harvested a wave of European markets. Just when everyone thought that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine began to ease, the euro no longer continued to depreciate. As a result, a few days ago, the Fed's Chairman Powell made a very tough speech, saying that he would continue to significantly raise rate hike to calm down US inflation, which means that it would not stop the US's pace of harvesting global finance.
Another thing is that the Americans not only blatantly robbed the $7 billion foreign reserves of Afghanistan , but even Russia, a country that is already quite powerful, has frozen US$300 billion in legal assets by the United States, and may even be confiscated to aid Ukrainian in the future.
These two things cannot be untouched to other countries in the world. Just look at the OPEC organization and you will know. OPEC's , Saudi , were used to be a die-hard ally of the United States. As a result, under a series of financial hegemony actions by the US government, Biden went everywhere to ask others to increase oil production, but no one paid attention to it. In the end, OPEC discussed with Russia before agreeing to increase oil production.
However, Europe is more economically bound to the interests of the United States, and it is more dependent on the United States in military terms. Now Germany and France are getting closer. German Chancellor Scholz had previously vowed to increase Germany's defense expenditure to 2% of GDP, decoupling from Russia in terms of energy and decoupling from China in the supply chain. I think it is to regain Germany's former world power status. French Macron even shouted from the day he took office to today, saying that Europe should not rely on NATO and France is not an appendix of the United States, but it also expressed the determination to rise of these two countries.
If at a certain time point in which the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has faded out of people's horizon, Germany announced that it would launch Nord Stream 2 instead of continuing to buy high-priced natural gas from the United States, it means that the Western order dominated by the United States is about to fall apart. However, if the world's energy landscape changes, Russia's natural gas supply is to countries led by China and not in the same camp as the United States, and the United States' natural gas supply to European countries led by Britain, France and Germany, then Germany's dream of becoming a world power and the core of Europe will be difficult to realize. The life gate of its energy is pinned to others' hands, and it will be difficult to become tough in international affairs, let alone break away from the control of the United States and take the independent diplomatic route.
