Norway’s Equinor will maintain maximum natural gas production rates through the spring and summer to help the European Union fill its gas storage facilities, the company’s chief executive said this week.
The pledge comes amid continued concern about gas supplies into the warmer months of the year, which is typically the time storage is filled up for the peak demand period of winter. Last year, most of Europe failed to make sure it had enough gas for the winter, which sparked the gas crunch.
Speaking to Bloomberg this week, Equinor’s Anders Opedal said that Norway had always been a reliable partner of Europe and will continue to supply as much gas as it can to the continent as possible. The problem for Europe is that what’s possible is less than half of the gas it needs. Much less, in fact.
According to Eurostat, the EU imported 46.8% of its natural gas from Russia in the first half of last year. Norway, for its part, accounted for 20.5% of natural gas imports during that period—less than half of what Russia sent the EU’s way.
According to Bruegel, a European economics think tank, Norway exported over 2.9 billion cu m weekly to the EU in late 2021. This compared with a little over 2.3 billion cu m for Russia. During the first half of the year, however, Gazprom kept flows above 3 billion cu m weekly while Norway never reached that level.