WASHNGTON, February 1. /TASS/. European countries will have serious difficulties next winter if they fail to reduce their natural gas consumption, the International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol told a seminar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
"If we don't find other gas supplies from different countries, there is only one way - save the gas. The gas demand needs to go down," he said, adding that if Europe fails to bring the gas demand down, "it'd be very difficult to overcome the next winter."
The IEA chief said Europe was lucky that this winter turned out to be relatively mild. In his words, the organization has two reasons to worry about the future winter season. Firstly, in 2022 Europe still had an opportunity to get Russian gas, although in smaller amounts, but it may not be available in 2023. Secondly, "for the first time in the history, the LNG imports of China went down," and Europe was lucky to have more LNG available on global markets.
"But then we'll get to 2023. Russian gas may not be with us anymore, which is most likely. China is coming back as a major LNG importer. And on top of that, the amount of new LNG capacity coming to markets in 2023 will be one of the lowest in the recent history," Birol said.
The International Monetary Fund published an update to its report on Monday, saying that it will be hard for European countries to replenish their natural gas reserves next winter due to a serious reduction of gas supplies from Russia.