Europe's gas storage is full. So?

European gas storage sites are full! Some to the brim! Others to a little more than the minimum required by Brussels! It’s all going to be well because we have our storage filled to more than 80%! (Cue: “Ode to Joy”)

Actually, as Europe’s leaders are already beginning to admit, drop by drop, all is not going to be well, not without a substantial reduction in demand for energy. And not for a very long time, even with a substantial reduction in demand for energy.

I’ve been in the news business for years and yet I still get amazed at the amount of information you can hide behind a barrage of loud headlines because so few people read beyond the headline. These days, you’d need to read way beyond the headline and beyond the news report to get to the important bits. Such as what is gas storage capacity?

On the face of it, the phrase is pretty self-explanatory and generally involves underground caverns. There’s an important bit right there that tends to get omitted. The European Union has 27 members. Not all of these members have underground caverns to store gas in. These members, therefore, have no physical way of filling up their gas storage. They don’t have any.

Moving on, how about the size of this capacity relative to a country’s gas consumption? Doomberg has done the work for me here, publishing a chart in this story from September that breaks down the EU’s gas in storage by country and by percentage of consumption.

The chart shows us that Austria, for instance, is one lucky European puppy because its gas in storage is enough to cover more than 80% of its annual consumption. Germany, on the other hand, is not particularly lucky: its gas in storage can cover a bit over 20% of consumption. And that’s not even the worst of it.