Who Survives Europe's Energy Crisis? - by Giacomo Prandelli
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Who Survives Europe's Energy Crisis?<br>5 charts to understand which countries are waking up and which are still sinking.
Giacomo Prandelli<br>Jul 04, 2026
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Dear Merchants,
Europe is running its energy system on a war footing. Gas storage sits at 31% of capacity, the lowest start to an injection season since 2018. TTF trades near 45 €/MWh with a war premium attached to every cargo that passes within missile range of Hormuz. IEEFA expects the USA to supply 66% of Europe’s LNG this year, the deepest supplier concentration the continent has ever run. This is the middle of a crisis, not the aftermath of one, and it is not hitting every country at the same depth. Some are waking up.<br>Others are sinking.<br>5 charts show the divide.
Every Country Replaced Russia Differently<br>Let’s start with the gas, because that is where the split began.<br>In 2020, Russian pipeline gas covered roughly 40% of European demand, and every country drank from the same pipe at roughly the same price. When that pipe closed, each country solved the problem alone, and the solutions were not equal. ACER reports that 58.4% of EU LNG came from the USA in 2025. IEEFA measured 63% in Q1 2026 and now has Europe on track for 66% across the full year, because the Iran war has made every Qatari cargo through Hormuz conditional. That average hides the real story, which is the spread between countries.
Not every European country handled the loss of Russian gas the same way. The divergence is now visible in every LNG cargo landed.<br>Germany sourced 92.4% of its LNG from the USA in 2025.<br>Greece took 90.0%, Finland 85.5%, the Netherlands 75.8%, the UK 75.6%, Poland 72.1%. At the other end of the table sit the countries with older, wider import networks: France at 47.8%, Italy at 47.2%, Spain at 45.3%, Belgium at 37.4%.<br>And Russia never fully left. I<br>EEFA counts Russian molecules at 13% to 16% of EU LNG in H1 2025, arriving quietly through Zeebrugge and Montoir.
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Add Norway, whose pipelines now carry about 30% of EU gas, up from roughly 24% in 2020, and the arithmetic becomes uncomfortable. 2 suppliers, the USA and Norway, now cover about 55% of European gas. That is more supplier concentration than Europe ran before 2022, when the politicians called dependency a strategic emergency.<br>Europe did not diversify, it swapped 1 dominant supplier for 2 friendlier ones and declared victory.<br>The market has already rehearsed what this concentration costs. In June 2022, the explosion at Freeport removed a single US liquefaction plant, about 2 Bcf/d, and TTF repriced violently within hours because Europe had nowhere else to turn. That was 1 facility. Today the exposure is a whole export coast, plus 1 Norwegian pipeline system whose maintenance schedule European traders now read the way they once read Gazprom nominations.<br>Diversification was the stated policy goal of 2022. Concentration is what actually got built and the buffer is gone. Europe entered the 2026 injection season with storage at 31% of capacity, the lowest level since 2018, after ending the winter below 30% and filling to less than 80% in 2025. Brussels quietly cut the storage target from 90% to 80%, which changes the regulation but not the physics. Europe has to buy more LNG than last year, into a market pricing an active war around Hormuz, with TTF near 45 €/MWh, roughly 35% above any level a European industrial buyer calls comfortable.<br>The countries most exposed to US LNG are also the countries paying the highest industrial energy bill. That is not a coincidence.
The Industrial Bill and Who Pays It<br>Cefic, the European chemical industry council, publishes the number that defines the emergency, and the number has not moved into 2026: European chemical companies pay roughly 3x US energy costs and roughly 2x Chinese ones. A chemical plant is mostly an energy bill with pipes attached, so that gap is not a margin problem. It is an existence problem.
European industrial energy costs are 3x US and 2x China. But that average hides a Europe that has already split in 2.<br>Inside the European average, the split from the first chart reappears with precision. Eurostat’s December 2024 data puts industrial electricity for medium consumers at 0.20 €/kWh in Germany, 0.16 €/kWh in France, 0.15 €/kWh in Italy.<br>By H2 2025 Germany paid above 0.22 €/kWh against an EU average of 0.18, which is 23% above the average of the club Germany is supposed to lead.<br>Germany pays 25% more than France for industrial electricity, and the gap is widening, not closing. This is not a residue of the 2022 shock. It is the cost baseline sitting inside every plant level investment decision being taken in Europe in 2026. Meanwhile a US Gulf Coast plant buys power at 30 to 40 $/MWh, a Chinese competitor at 50 to 70 $/MWh, and the TTF to Henry Hub gas spread sits stubbornly at 3x to 4x.<br>The gap with the US is not a market anomaly that...