One would think a powerhouse like the EU could just decide to find fossil fuels from elsewhere, but that’s easier said than done. James Glynn, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, tells“The urgency right now is around natural gas,” Glynn says. “The problem is the ability to move it around.
A lot of the consumers in Europe that are using Russian gas are on the eastern borders of Europe, and a lot of the spare capacity is in the west.”Without pipelines to get natural gas from the west to the east, the EU has to figure out how to transport it to countries that need a steady supply, Glynn says, especially if Russia starts cutting off even more countries. That could mean more pipelines in the long-term and transporting gas on roads or rail in the short-term.