Why Germany Can’t Just Pull the Plug on Russian Energy
Under increasing pressure to sever the country’s reliance on Russian energy, German officials must contend with deeply rooted economic ties.
Melissa Eddy, who is based in Berlin, has covered Germany politics, business and culture since 2005.
Last year, Russia supplied more than half of the natural gas and about a third of all the oil that Germany burned to heat homes, power factories and fuel cars, buses and trucks. Roughly half of Germany’s coal imports, which are essential to its steel manufacturing, came from Russia.
Russian gas, oil and coal are embedded in the German economy and way of life. The roots run deep.
The first natural gas pipeline connecting what was then West Germany to Siberia was completed in the early 1980s. The legacy of the Cold War can still been seen in the energy infrastructure in Germany’s east, which remains directly linked to Russia, making it harder to get oil from other providers into that part of the country.
Today, those entanglements loom large as European leaders debate whether energy should be included in more sanctions on Russia amid growing evidence of atrocities committed by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians. Officials in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, are caught between outrage at Russia’s aggression and their continuing need for the country’s essential commodities.
“It was a mistake that Germany became so heavily dependent on energy imports from Russia,” Christian Lindner, Germany’s finance minister, said Tuesday, heading into talks with his European Union colleagues in Luxembourg.
He indicated that Germany would support a fifth package of sanctions against Russia, including an import ban on Russian coal, announced Tuesday by the European Union’s president, Ursula von der Leyen. That would be a shift from Berlin’s recent insistence that energy sanctions would hurt Germany more than Russia.
From the heads of leading chemical and steel companies to the makers of gummy bears, business leaders have warned that without a steady supply of gas, oil and coal, their production would grind to a halt.
Natural gas heats German homes and generates power.
Nearly half of all German homes are heated with natural gas, which is also used to generate power in heavy industry. Germany’s powerful labor unions in the chemical, mining and pharmaceutical sectors have warned that serious reductions in gas imports could lead to substantial job losses.
A group of economists at the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences said in a report last month that a short-term stop of Russian gas deliveries would be “manageable” if the country could increase its reliance on other energy sources.
Robert Habeck, Germany’s energy minister, is scrambling to do just that, making trips to Qatar and Washington to secure energy partnerships. Already Germany has reduced its dependence on gas from Russia by 15 percent, bringing it down to 40 percent in the first three months of the year, the energy ministry said.
But industry leaders have pushed back against imposing sanctions on Russian natural gas. Turning off the taps would cause “irreversible damage,” warned Martin Brudermüller, the chief executive of BASF, the chemical producer based in southwestern Germany. Making the transition from Russian natural gas to other suppliers or moving to alternative energy sources would require four to five years, not weeks, he said.
“Do we want to blindly destroy our entire national economy? What we have built up over decades?” Mr. Brudermüller said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last week. “I think such an experiment would be irresponsible.”
The country’s makers of chocolates, snacks and sweets have also warned that gas shortages would spell doom for their ability to produce the high-energy food.