Europe's “energy security” mechanism is worthy of a Darwin Award – expert
European countries are buying the same amount of energy this year from the same place, but paying twice as much as last year.
The participants of the round table in Moscow spoke about this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Last year, on purchases by consumers in Europe, on purchases of oil and gas, we mean large players, these are not end consumers, spent about 600-700 billion dollars. This year, according to preliminary estimates, these costs will double, for gas - significantly, for oil the price differs less. That is, up to approximately 700 billion they will have to spend more on additional energy purchases. More precisely, the energy is the same, but the prices are higher. It's only oil and gas. Plus coal...
Europe's total energy spending will rise by more than a trillion dollars this year. The amount is staggering, but there is one “but”: if you calculate how much of this money goes to Russia, then approximately the same amount goes as last year. The volumes are smaller, the prices are higher, but the price is the same. This means that the main, lion’s share of this finance goes somewhere else,” said Vyacheslav Kulagin, head of the department for research of the world and Russian energy complex at the Institute of Energy Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In turn, the director of the Energy Security Fund, Sergei Pikin, explained where and by what mechanism part of the European finances goes for the purchase of energy resources.
“Despite the ongoing sanctions, Europeans continue to buy Russian oil. I’ll say more: they will continue to buy it after December. It’s just that purchasing schemes are becoming more and more complex and sophisticated; they, of course, increase costs. But oil molecules have no color, just like gas molecules, so the origin can only be understood from documents, and documents can change in the process of moving from point A to point B. What many suppliers are doing now is that the Russian one leaves, and some kind comes out. then “other” oil.
Even without some of the mixtures that were actively savored at the beginning of the sanctions - the Latvian mixture, the Malaysian mixture. A new type of oil that China receives, but this type of mixture produces more oil than Malaysia actually produces, and more reaches China. That is, apparently, along the way it grows on its own.
That is, there are many different schemes, it’s probably not worth talking about them, because this is a separate story. I am sure that deliveries will continue, simply in more complex ways, at higher costs. But in general, the mechanism, rather, does not qualify for the Nobel Prize, but for the Darwin Prize, from the point of view of how to quickly kill your own economy with your own hands, using “good” goals,” Pikin is sure.
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