I’m quite sure there are still a few European gas executives sitting quietly in their corner offices, nursing their lattes and nostalgia, waiting for the good times to return. I understand the sentiment. Having an endless torrent of Russian gas flowing in from the East was comfortable. It gave Europe the illusion of energy security—a warm, steady heartbeat under the industrial skin.
Europeans have never really shed their utility mindset. They like predictability, the kind of dependable baseload that pays the bills while leaving a little cream on top. Trading the surplus, smoothing the peaks—business as usual, civilized and calm. For a time, it worked beautifully. Then the fantasy collapsed.
That friendly, cheap, ever-reliable Russian gas—the supposed lifeblood of Europe’s prosperity—is gone. The official excuse, of course, is “the war.” Convenient, tidy, and emotionally satisfying. Blame the conflict, blame the politics, blame the sanctions. But what if the war wasn’t the cause at all? What if it merely exposed what was already rotting beneath the surface?
Because here’s the unpleasant truth: Russia was running out of legacy gas. The old fields—the giants like Urengoy—were wheezing their last breaths. Urengoy, once the pride of Soviet extraction, was forecast to peak in 2022. And what a coincidence—something else rather dramatic also happened in 2022, didn’t it?
Yes, there are new fields in Yamal and elsewhere, but they’re expensive, remote, and infrastructurally brutal to connect. Developing them destroys the myth of “cheap Russian gas.” The fairy tale was already over; the war just turned the page for us.So, to the executives still staring east, waiting for the pipelines of yesteryear to hum again—don’t hold your breath. The cheap gas isn’t coming back. Not because of politics, but because geology already voted no.