Chris Lange, FISM News
The U.S. and Europe have begun searching for backup fuel sources out of fears that Moscow may cut off natural gas shipments as leverage in the Ukraine/Russia conflict according to a White House briefing. Russia currently provides roughly a third of Europe’s fossil fuel.
Senior Biden administration officials said Tuesday that the U.S. is in talks with major energy-producing countries around the world to develop a contingency plan to ensure an uninterrupted energy flow into Europe.
They said the need for the contingency plans were in case “they [Russia] attempt to upend the world order, to damage infrastructure, or withholding supplies from markets in a retaliation for sanctions or other countermeasures by the United States and our allies.”
“We’ve been working to identify additional volumes of non- Russian natural gas from various areas of the world; from North Africa and the Middle East to Asia and the United States,” a senior official said on the press call. White House officials did not supply names of specific companies with whom they are in talks.
“Correspondingly, we’re … in discussions with major natural gas producers around the globe to understand their capacity and willingness to temporarily surge natural gas output and to allocate these volumes to European buyers,” the official said.
Reuters reports that energy companies who have been contacted by U.S. government officials have indicated that global gas supplies are limited and cannot possibly replace the volume supplied by Russia.