Russia’s Natural Gas Exports to Europe Have Dropped a Ton, But …

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There’s been a bit of talk this week about how Europe is still buying fossil fuels from Russia. As usual, a bit of a lying has been going on, but there’s also a bit of truth to it. Funny enough, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) just put out a little report on this topic a few weeks ago. When it comes to natural gas (aka fossil gas), the following is the key chart:

Russian Natural Gas Exports

**Data source:** U.S. Energy Information Administration analysis based on International Energy Agency, Global Trade Tracker, and Vortexa. **Note:** LNG=liquefied natural gas. figure data

As you can see, Europe’s use of natural gas from Russia declined enormously from 2021 to 2023. If you ignore Turkiye and Belarus, Europe’s imports of Russian natural gas declined by about ⅔. Europe is buying about ⅓ of the fossil gas from Russian that it was buying a few years ago.

“Although the EU has not directly sanctioned imports of Russia’s natural gas to its member states, other policies and economic factors reduced EU imports by more than two-thirds, from 14.7 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2020 to 4.4 Bcf/d in 2024,” the EIA writes.

Unfortunately, as you can also see, Europe is still buying fossil gas from Russia. Apparently, it is somehow harder for Europe to ween itself off of that than many of us would hope. Maybe give it a few more years?

Also unfortunately, Russia has been able to sell a lot more of this natural gas to China. China apparently doesn’t care what Russia has been doing to Ukraine (including women and children), and has been more than happy to help Russia out and buy some of the extra natural gas the country has hanging around.

Russian Coal Exports

**Data source:** U.S. Energy Information Administration analysis based on Global Trade Tracker, International Energy Agency, and various industry reporting. **Note:** figure data

The situation with coal is a bit better. Europe has basically stopped buying any Russian coal — unless you count Turkiye, which has no problem buying Russian coal and even increased its purchases significantly in 2023 and 2024.

Again, China has ramped up its purchases, and India has as well this time.

Yet again, this just shows the importance of switching to renewable energy and electric vehicles as quickly as possible in order to ween ourselves off of fossil fuels and the evil alliances people end up making to satisfy our addictions.

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