Changing the Energy Equation in Europe

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 08, 2022

 

Behind Japan, Germany and Russia are the two nations in the world best positioned to appreciate just exactly how the United States ended World War II in the Pacific.

 

When World War II began, there was no such thing as an atomic bomb. The concept of a nuclear chain reaction dated only to the 1930s, and the closest thing to nuclear power that had been produced was brief fission of uranium in a laboratory. The United States — with the help of some of the best scientific minds of Europe, chased away by Adolf Hitler — oversaw the conceptualization, development, production, and deployment of the first nuclear weapon, taking it from the physicists’ blackboards to the bomb bay of the Enola Gay, in a remarkably brief period of time: The Manhattan Project lasted about four years.

 

The United States did this while in the midst of a ruinous war that, among its many other horrors, severely disrupted industrial and economic activity in the United States and around the world — and was insanely expensive to boot.

 

The United States is not currently at war with Russia. Neither is Germany. Neither is the rest of the European Union. But we all have a Russia problem that needs solving.

 

Replacing Russian fuel in the European economy would be — or, rather, will be — a difficult and expensive proposition. Wildly so, in all likelihood. To replace Russian gas imported by European consumers would require a great deal of equipment and infrastructure that does not currently exist: The United States produces a great deal of gas and has the capacity to produce more, as do many other petroleum-producing nations, but we do not have the LNG-ready ships, the necessary terminals, or the regassification facilities in Europe to make that happen; nor do the Europeans have all the pipelines they would need to connect to other providers closer at hand. But we know how to build LNG-ready ships, terminals, and regassification facilities. We know how to build new pipelines. None of that requires groundbreaking work in physics or the invention of new technologies. It doesn’t need a team of Einsteins and Oppenheimers. All it needs is doing. That is not to say it will be easy — only that it relies on technologies and capacities that already exist and do not have to be invented.

 

This isn’t an immediately urgent issue for Washington. Thanks to all that hated fracking, the United States has abundant natural gas. But the question that Berlin and Brussels should be asking themselves right now is: Do they want to get started on this before the Russians cut them off, or do they want to wait until they are in an energy crisis after the Russians have cut them off? Which the Russians are very likely going to do, because the gas supply is the only real instrument of coercion they will have to use against Europe in their effort to get relief from the economic sanctions that are strangling their economy.

 

Right now, the Europeans are worried about Russia cutting them off. But we have the ability to turn that around and make the Russians worry about Europe cutting them off. The pipelines are where they are, and a pipeline without a paying customer at the end of it might as well not be there. The European Union has a diverse economy. Russia does not. And the Russians don’t want to spend the next 20 years selling their only real export at a steep discount to the Chinese and the Indians, taking a haircut on their energy and getting nothing but renminbi and rupees in exchange, without the prospect of a dollar, euro, or yen landing in their coffers for the foreseeable future.

 

The United States, the European Union, and Japan constitute the wealthiest and most technologically sophisticated societies the world has ever seen. Together, they account for about half of the economic output of the entire human race. And in spite of the infantilizing talk of our politicians, I do not think that Americans have suddenly become incompetent, that we are for some inexplicable reason incapable today of doing the kind of world-changing things we did way back in the first half of the 20th century and continued to do thereafter. I do not think that all we know how to do is invent social-media platforms and manage hedge funds.

 

Changing the energy equation in Europe would shift the geopolitical balance decidedly in favor of the free world. Of course, the transition costs will be enormous — but they are going to get even heavier the longer we all wait, and Europe is not likely to escape paying them at some point.

 

Gas is only part of the solution, of course, and maybe not the most important part: It very well may turn out to be the case that once the relevant parties sit down and run the numbers, the most effective and easily achievable thing to do would be renewing and expanding Europe’s capacity for generating electricity with nuclear power, which would make much of that natural-gas deficit moot. The Greens won’t love it, for ideological reasons, but from a climate point of view, nuclear power is by far the most desirable source of electricity that can be depended on to perform in a practical and consistent way.

 

It is very likely that there is never going to be a more politically advantageous moment to do this than right now, when the United States, the European Union, and much of the rest of the world are enjoying a rare moment of broad consensus in the face of Russia’s brutal campaign of slaughter and atrocity in Ukraine. I do not expect the Biden administration to take the lead on this (or on much of anything else), but there is more urgency for Olaf Scholz and his government — and the U.S. energy industry has an enormous quantity of capital, brainpower, and practical expertise to bring to the problem, and it needs no invitation from Washington to do so.

 

This isn’t the Manhattan Project or the moonshot — this is keeping the lights on and fueling vehicles, something that we have been doing since the 19th century. It is time for the richest and most powerful nations of the world to starting acting like it rather than allow themselves to be bullied by a tinpot dictator in a pissant country with an economy that wouldn’t make the top three if it were in a U.S. state.

 

If we can’t work up the necessary self-respect, we should at least act out of self-interest.