BERLIN – When the main artery of natural gas between Russia and Germany, the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, went offline last week for 10 days of scheduled maintenance, European leaders began to prepare for the possibility that the president Russian Vladimir V. Putin did not. reactivate it in retaliation for opposing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
But Putin has suggested that gas will flow back into Europe after work on the pipeline, controlled by Russian state energy giant Gazprom, ends on Thursday, although he warned that supplies could be further reduced.
The European Commission called on the 27 members of the bloc to immediately begin taking steps to reduce gas consumption by 15 percent. “Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon, “Commission chairwoman Ursula von der Leyen told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday.
But analysts have noted that if Russia ceased gas flows to Europe, the country would lose an element of leverage in the economic battle it has maintained against the continent since the invasion of Ukraine, allowing Mr Putin to exercise control over supplies and prices.
Speaking to reporters in Tehran on Tuesday afternoon after meeting with leaders of Iran and Turkey, Putin warned that Gazprom would only send “half the planned volume” through the North Stream pipeline. By the time it closed on July 11 for annual maintenance, flows had already been reduced to 40 percent of capacity.
Maintaining such a low flow of natural gas could be advantageous for the Russian leader, analysts said, which would allow him to keep Europeans in a prolonged state of uncertainty and near panic. Russia has already stopped delivering gas through other major oil pipelines in Europe that run through Poland and Ukraine.
“To the extent that Putin maintains some gas flows in North Stream 1, he enjoys both revenue and leverage,” said David L. Goldwyn, a former State Department energy diplomat who served during the first mandate of the Obama administration. “Once you cut off the supply, you lose both and there is no going back.”
European gas prices have soared up to three or four times those of a year ago, causing a rise in inflation and raising concerns about social unrest once temperatures begin to fall.
The European Union imported 45 percent of its natural gas from Russia last year. That fell to just 28 percent in the first three months of this year. At the same time, overall gas imports to the bloc increased, driven largely by a 72 percent increase in liquefied natural gas purchases.
Gazprom has blamed the reduction in flows through Nord Stream to a turbine that was sent to Montreal for repairs and could not be returned due to sanctions against Russia. German officials questioned Gazprom’s claim that the turbine could have caused such a flow cut.
Since then, the German government has secured the return of the equipment, which was manufactured and repaired by Siemens Energy at a Canadian plant. But Mr. Putin said another of the six compressor turbines near Russia’s Baltic Sea coast now needed reform and indicated there were problems with others as well.
“If one more comes, it’s fine, two will work. And if it doesn’t arrive, there will be one, it will be only 30 million cubic meters a day “, he told the journalists. That’s less than 20 percent of the pipeline’s capacity of 160 million cubic meters of gas a day, or 5.6 billion cubic feet.
Records from a Nord Stream website indicated that a small amount of gas flowed down the pipe on Tuesday afternoon, in an apparent test. A site managed by network provider Gascade showed capacity had been booked through Nord Stream by Thursday. These are no guarantees that gas will flow, but it could indicate Russia’s continued interest in channeling gas to Europe.
Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University, said keeping a low flow in Nord Stream could strengthen Russia’s position and even weaken Europe’s determination if the war dragged on.
“Maintaining Russia’s energy dependence on Russia and fueling uncertainty about the supply of natural gas, which can only help raise prices,” he said, are some of the reasons why Mr. Putin would like to keep Nord Stream online. There is added appeal, said Mr. Prasad, to be able to “control to some extent the economic destiny of Europe.”
But the return of flows from Russia this week is not a guarantee that they will continue in the future or that they will be enough for Germany and its European partners to meet their targets of filling gas storage tanks at 80 percent of their capacity in early November. In Germany, where half of homes are heated with natural gas and fuel is needed for the chemical, steel and paper industries, storage levels reached 65 percent on Wednesday, slightly above average. European Union.
This week, Ms. von der Leyen traveled to Azerbaijan to reach an agreement to double Azerbaijan’s natural gas imports to at least 20 billion cubic meters (706 billion cubic feet) by 2027 as part of efforts across Europe to ensure gas from sources beyond Russia.
Germany has traveled to the Netherlands and Norway to get more gas, in addition to buying more liquefied natural gas in the United States and Qatar. But none of Europe’s 26 LNG terminals, which are needed to convert gas from its deep cooling state into a gas, is in Germany.
Robert Habeck, German economy minister and vice chancellor, has raised 2.94 billion euros to rent four floating LNG terminals. The first ones are scheduled to go live at the end of the year.
But if Europe faces an unusually cold winter, it may not be soon enough to ensure that Germany keeps its homes air-conditioned and factories running. Germany has already activated two steps of a three-stage “gas emergency” plan, recovering coal-fired power plants to replace gas-fired ones and analyzing scenarios of what would happen if the gas were cut off completely.
For some observers, the panic of recent weeks is exactly what Mr Putin wants.
“Will it give us gas? Will it cut off the flow? Europe is once again hanging on Putin’s lips,” Janis Kluge, a Russian analyst at the German Institute for International Affairs and Security in Berlin, wrote on Twitter. “However, the North Stream 1 saga continues, it certainly loves every part.”
Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin and Patricia Cohen from London. Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed with reports from Brussels, and Anton Troianovski from Berlin.