Germany ramps up Russian LNG imports via EU ports
Germany has boosted purchases of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) via other EU countries, despite having previously halted direct shipments of the fuel, according to a new report.
The analysis, jointly released by Belgian, German, and Ukrainian NGOs on Tuesday, claims that German state-owned energy company SEFE acquired 58 shipments of Russian LNG via the French port of Dunkirk in 2024, totaling 4.1 million tons – more than six times the volume imported the previous year.
Estimates suggest that between 3% and 9.2% of Germany's gas supply continues to originate from Russia, although routed through other EU countries.
SEFE, a former subsidiary of Russia's Gazprom, previously known as Gazprom Germania, has a long-term contract on LNG supplies from Russia's Yamal export facility. Under the contract, SEFE has reportedly directed almost all of its cargoes to an import facility in France, where the LNG is re-gasified and fed into the interconnected European gas pipeline system. In November, Germany instructed its state-operated import terminals to reject Russian LNG cargoes entirely.
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'Germany has banned the import of Russian LNG at its ports, but imports officially sourced from France and Belgium actually include Russian LNG, effectively whitewashing the gas,'
claimed Angelos Koutsis, energy policy officer at the Belgian think tank Bond Beter Leefmilieu, which co-authored the report.
'The result is that all countries involved can claim they are not responsible for the growing demand for Russian LNG,'
he argued.
Energy ministers from Belgium, France, and Spain – countries whose ports receive Russian LNG shipments – have argued that most of the gas is not consumed domestically but instead piped to other EU nations, according to the Financial Times.
The lack of transparency within the EU's internal gas market has led to
'finger-pointing among member states,'
the report stated, noting the difficulty of tracing the precise volume of Russian LNG in the system.
The report claimed that overall EU imports of Russian LNG reached record levels in 2024, jumping by more than 19% in annual terms.
Germany benefited from cheap Russian energy for over two decades. Before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the EU's top economy relied on Russia for 40% of its gas imports and was among the hardest hit in the bloc by the supply reductions.
While imports of pipeline gas from Russia have mostly been halted amid restrictions related to the Ukraine conflict and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, EU countries have continued to buy record volumes of LNG from the sanctioned country.
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In June, Brussels targeted imports of the super-chilled fuel for the first time, banning re-loading operations, ship-to-ship transfers, and ship-to-shore transfers with the purpose of re-exporting to third countries via the EU. The sanctions have a nine-month transition period.
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