The shifting character of the energy landscape cannot be refuted. Every time we try and examine the issue, there is a significant development that changes things. The media talks about the issue but in a way that is often too selective and which focuses on one or other aspect or only concentrates on news about the question in their country of publication, subsequently restricting the overview.
Users are waking up. A general comment to begin with: the link between oil prices and the development of alternative energies has been known about for a long time and is becoming ever more apparent. In the past, oil interests nearly always prevailed and led to a slowdown or even the abandonment of studies and projects of interest to competing sources. Currently, it is the big users who are shifting and looking ahead. We are aware of the pressure on the aviation sector: planes consume and pollute too much and the question of whether to tax the fuel they use and limit their expansion is being posed more frequently. Stakeholders do not just bleat about the issue now, they respond in other ways. The most recent sensational news has been about the experimental flight from London to Amsterdam using kerosene that was partly renewable and non-polluting. The aim is to produce bio-kerosene from biomass or seaweed that is not destined for the human food chain: no competition with foodstuffs and no deforestation. Boeing and Airbus are working on it, not only for the planes of the future but also for those already in service.
It's just an example of what's currently fermenting. There will be failures and disappointments, and charlatans will also have their role to play, but we have to have confidence in European inventiveness (not just from Europe either). There is talk once again about hydrogen for transport and the possibility of obtaining a 40% reduction in total oil consumption in this sector by 2050. The profitability threshold for hydrogen engines could be reached by 2025, with 16 million hydrogen-powered cars being driven in Europe by 2030 (EUROPE 9609). Is this realistic or still a pipe-dream? According to one commentator, the post-oil era has already begun.
From Africa to the Balkans. My second general remark involves the link between political strategies and the control over energy sources, which is known about but sometimes forgotten. Most conflicts in Africa are over the control of oil or gas (and other mineral sources, including uranium). The visible protagonists are the Africans themselves, but the less visible protagonists are China, the USA, and Europe, with Russia now arriving on the scene (Gazprom may participate in a joint project with Total in Nigeria). Merciless conflicts therefore ensue between African factions who fiercely fight over control of production or transit in one or other of these countries. The ethnic factor also sometimes plays a damaging part but in the majority of cases it is energy that feeds corruption, chaos and poverty.
Energy is also one of the major instruments in political strategies and struggles for power involving Russia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Turkey, Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan) and Iran. EU countries are directly involved in these strategies, on an individual basis, without any coordination between them because the EU has no external energy policy at all, a shortcoming that leads to many voices being raised, as well as concerns (see this column in EUROPE 9601). Russian support for Serbia has a strong smell of gas about it. Control of Beopetrol (second biggest oil company in Serbia) has already been taken over by Russia's Lukoil but control of Naftna Inustrija Srbije (NIS) by Gazprom is very recent and happened at the same time as Serbia won a stake in South Stream, the gas pipeline rival of Nabucco, which will transport gas from Russia (or from other neighbouring sources) to Italy by by-passing Turkey. This has been made possible by bilateral agreements that Russia had concluded and which it is developing with Austria, Italy and more recently Hungary and Bulgaria. The latter depends almost exclusively on Russia for its energy supplies: 100% for gas. Lukoil owns the only Bulgarian refinery and the future Bulgarian nuclear plant will be built by Atomstroyexport.
The Nabucco project, the EU's gas supply route which does not go through Russia, has not been abandoned, but the EU will then have to depend on Turkey, which has proved that it also knows how to use the energy instrument as a political and strategic weapon, by opposing France's participation in the project (see this column in EUROPE 9600).
Tomorrow this column will report on other more specific developments in the domestic European situation that go beyond the general political and strategic aspects in the energy dossiers. (F.R.)