This article descibes how Europe has become increasingly dependent on Russian hydrocarbons , gas especially, and how this coincided with a scaling back of its own production despite potentially huge resources available by following the US by using fracking to get at previously irrecoverable deposits.
This persisted even after Putin's Russia started to weaponize these exports to pressure Europe on key issues. It has required the Ukraine invasion to prompt a serious rethink about this, most notably in Germany.
In 2020 Russia exported nearly three times more gas than Europe produced. What’s amazing is that Europe increased its reliance on Russian gas even after Gazprom repeatedly suspended pipeline exports to Ukraine. Germany’s response: Build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to make itself less dependent on gas flowing through Ukraine.
Poland and Lithuania were smarter and built terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). But Europe had another option: fracking. European gas production has naturally fallen as older fields get tapped out. But producers could use hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to exploit shale and squeeze more gas out of the ground, as they have in the U.S.
Europe had an estimated 966 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable wet natural gas resources as of 2013, about enough to supply the EU for some 60 years. Much of this is located in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. But France, U.K., the Netherlands and Germany are also sitting on shale deposits.
Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen blamed Russia for fueling the fracking opposition. “Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” he noted in 2014.