European Gas prices just surged 50% after the Qatari LNG production is under attack

https://feddit.uk/post/45195551

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That’s why the price surged.
We buy the much more expensive US fracking gas. That spike is a minor blip to Europe.

The European Commission has a website listing the top gas suppliers to Europe
…europa.eu/…/where-does-the-eu-s-gas-come-from/

Our main suppliers currently are:

  • Norway - 31.1%
  • United States - 25.4%
  • Russia - 13.1%
  • North Africa - 12.8%
  • United Kingdom - 4.3%
  • Qatar - 3.8%

While Qatar doesn’t provide a huge proportion of European gas, it’s not insignificant either. A disruption in the supply of Qatari gas could very easily cause prices to go up by a lot.

It’s almost as if we should do everything in our power to rid ourselves of the dependency on fossil fuels

www.cip.com/projects/…/hydrogen-island/

Hydrogen Island

Hydrogen Island

At full capacity (10GW), the island is expected to produce around 1 million tonnes of green hydrogen, corresponding to roughly 7% of Europe’s expected hydrogen demand

10GW = 87.6 TWh / year (even assuming 100% efficiency of the P2G process). That’s 10% of Germanys gas consumption of last year (864TWh). The EU consumes something like 5000TWh per year.

So while this might be a cool project and a much needed one, it’s not nearly enough to replace our gas imports. We should really stop using gas to heat our homes and use the miniscule amount of green gas we can produce for the processes that really require it.

In other news: Our (German) government wants to go back to gas heating and combustion engines, hoping to find some e-fuels in the attic.

Also not the 13.1% Russian share. This is the last year Russian LNG imports are allowed and imports using short term contracts are banned in two months.
It’s not just about where european countries buy, there’s a global market, it’s about who bought gas from Qatar and where they will buy their gas now. AFAIK Qatar exports a lot to asian countries, if they can’t get gas from Qatar anymore they’re going to buy from other countries, for example from the USA. That’s going to raise the price for US fracking gas and will affect Europe.
Exactly. India buys from Qatar. Qatar stops supplying, India starts buying from the US, just like us.
I‘ve read the world just lost about 20% of the total supply with that facility. Supply chains are in shambles everywhere.

It seems to me that every conflict spikes oil prices, relatively unpredictably (if you can call this unpredictable).

Maybe the world should look for alternative sources of energy, which are abundant, cheap, and can be deployed non centrally?

No. No that’s insane.

Yes, then we will fight over Rare Earths.
I mean sure but if you already own an electric car then a spike in battery price doesn’t particularly affect your day to day like a spike in gas prices would.
I think bombs dropping on heads will still affect daily life.
Much of Europe uses gas for heating their houses. Much of industry uses vast amounts of gas for heating all sorts of materials from asphalt to bread.
Yeah fair, it’s mostly useless in my state, but very prevalent in other states I just forget it exists. But also swapping a stove, water heater, and AC is still a lot cheaper than a new car. (I mean the AC is the only one that’s even close) are there other things people use gas for I’m forgetting?
Heating. Swapping which is far above the price of a used car.

Fair, most buying an EV I assumed are new and not used so I was looking at like 30-60k (in America) for car vs like 10-20k for new AC/water heater/stove+new wiring (more expensive than the stove or water heater themselves.) but it’s a lot more comparable when looking at used (still like 10-20k).

Also I realize I’m in hot world where AC=heating and cooling and in not-hot world heating and AC might not be interchangeable but I can’t imagine heating costs much more than an AC unit?

Rare earths are not geographically rare. There is just a lower % of them per sample.
They also are used in ICE catalytic convertors in every vehicle. But, unlike ICE, EV rare earths can be recycled.
You can recycle catalytic converters though, that’s really not the big problem for combustion engines…
not very efficiently. There’s a reason crackheads steal newer ones.

Yes, it is more so the efficient processing and refining that is rare.

You can make a T-shirt anywhere, but if you have to first build your own cotton farms and factories locally, construction will take years and your shirts will cost 10x more.

Sodium ion batteries are already in production. They’re not quite at the energy density of lithium but it’s close and also irrelevant for grid storage.
Are they? I haven’t really been able to find any being offered.
The world’s first sodium-ion battery EV is here and it could be a game changer

Leading global battery maker CATL and Changan Automobile unveiled the world’s first passenger EV powered by a sodium-ion battery on...

Electrek
Cool! I kinda meant “can I buy the cells”, but if they’re being produced in car scales, it’ll probably be a yes pretty soon.

After a little more digging, yes you can!

alibaba.com/…/catl-sodium-ion-battery-cell.html

2025 CATL Sodium Ion Battery Cell - 210Ah 4000 Cycles

Discover CATL sodium ion battery cells with 4000 cycles, 3.1V 210Ah capacity, CE certified for solar storage & EVs – reliable, long-life energy solution.

Rare earths aren’t just used in batteries, lol

These prices are literally controlled by price-fixing cartels.

But Europe is investing hundreds of billions in North Sea wind farms to generate hydrogen for heating, it was initiated by Putin’s actions.

www.cip.com/projects/…/hydrogen-island/

Hydrogen Island

Hydrogen Island

Now we just have to hope that people dont dig up this bullshit idea of using hydrogen to heat your own house.
I always love the stupidity of this idea: You were able to generate pure hydrogen at high costs… Now what should we do with it? Well lets just do what we did since the middle ages and burn it!
Well, there are useful appliances for hydrogen, where you just burn it. Burning it to heat your own home isnt one if them.
Hydrogen has one of the highest energy densities by mass. It’s a very reasonable energy storage

If you’re launching a rocket, sure. If cost or difficulty matters in any way compared to raw mass, not really.

It was talked about for cars where density kinda matters, but you could put them in a fuel cell that way instead of just burning it, and I’m not sure if it was ever anywhere close to economical.

The cost probably will go down, and with any luck the cost of polluting will go up, but electricity is going to be more practical for most things.

Craziest implementation? Burn the hydrogen in your home. But not in a furnace. Burn it in a mechanical combustion-powered heat pump!😁

There’s really nothing wrong with generating hydrogen when power costs are negative.

Except that only happens like 500 hours a year.

And hydrogen will leak from any tank.

And it turns metal brittle.

And I wouldn’t trust my neighbor with a propane tank, let alone hydrogen.

And its nearly impossible to transport through existing infrastructure.

But other than that, its great!

You forgot about the part where the possibility of generating hydrogen cleanly from electricity later is used as an excuse to build infrastructure and fuel-cell cars for it now, even though hydrogen now is dirty hydrogen produced by cracking fossil fuels.

I have no confidence that the second phase of switching to electrolysis would actually happen, and that “hydrogen” isn’t just a greenwashing scam perpetrated by natural gas producers.

What’s that? I couldn’t hear you over the nonstop greenwashing of gas cracking plants.
Wow! so glad we have clean coal now!

🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵

The Gang Heat Their House With Hydrogen

Like, in place of natural gas?
Gas is not oil.
Why is this downvoted? This guy is technically correct. 
Because Lemmy. Facts lose to feels.
The pedofile parasite class says no
Yeah, but power sources that don’t spew fumes are for limp-wristed queers. /s
Whatever comes next I‘m prepared to be deeply disappointed by my government and our European partners on this. „Make gas cheaper“ is probably at the very top of every leader‘s to do list tomorrow.
@NomNom
It's OK, Trump & his buddies all invested in LNG (& Oil & Military hardware cos) before ordering the war so they'll have made $BILLIONS by having many Iranian people (kids included) + US troops killed on a whim.👍
And the German government wants to end the sales ban for gas boilers. 55% of German gas consumption is used to heat buildings. So this is a key part of reducing consumption. Another case of a conservative government hurting Germany badly.

I’m laughing because I went with Habeck’s advice and installed a simple heat exchanger in my house that is hooked up to a centralized community heating system that runs on sustainable heat sources. Because Habeck, imperfect as he may have been, had a realistic view on things that was rooted in scientific data.

Fuck the CDU and fuck the SPD, fucking class-traitor scumbags.

If only we had some way of generating energy independent of oil and fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, we don’t, because those take a long time to build and we keep putting it off.

And the other option requires batteries that take a long time to make.

‘Nuclear takes too long to build’ has been an argument against nuclear for several times longer than it takes to build even the most stringently safe nuclear power plant… its depressing.
What do you mean you don’t? Has everything I heard in Cuba, China and Africa been a lie?

China is building a load of nuclear plants, it’s working very well for them and moving very quickly. They’re also building numerous solar farms and coal plants because they need whatever they can get.

Many places in Africa are doing great on Solar power, but they have requirements orders of magnitude lower than most western countries.

I don’t know much about Cuba.

Nah. All it takes is investment and commitment to treating electricity like a utility beyond the profit imperative. Look at what China is doing with sodium-ion batteries.
We’ve had hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear energy for a long time.
A more modern and interconnected grid would do a lot already and greatly reduce the demand for batteries. There are many things one can do. But you are right in the sense that they are largely not done. That doesnt mean there exists no way though we know how to do it but we dont.