Looking at monthly data from January 2022 to December 2022 (Figure 11), with the exception of March and April, consumption has been consistently below the 2017-2022 average of the respective months of those years. Between January and July 2022, natural gas consumption in the EU varied between 1 938 Petajoules (PJ) in January and 785 PJ in July, indicating a monthly decrease overall, even before the target of 15% gas reduction was set up
Absolutely no reason to worry about supply, cold homes, or lights going out.
This was always scare-mongering. The main consumers were the German petro-chemical industry producing for export and thus undercutting the European competition with cheap Russian gas. These have now largely shut down their old extremely wasteful plants as only the cheap energy supply was keeping them profitable and no amount of LNG would help with that.
In the short term this is of course not great for the German GDP (and company profits), but it forces them to innovate and switch to processes that can use renewable energy, so all in all that is probably a positive development.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Energy_statistics_-_latest_trends_from_monthly_data#Gas_consumption
While the gas reserves are higher than ever (https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/infographics/gas-storage-capacity/)
Absolutely no reason to worry about supply, cold homes, or lights going out.
This was always scare-mongering. The main consumers were the German petro-chemical industry producing for export and thus undercutting the European competition with cheap Russian gas. These have now largely shut down their old extremely wasteful plants as only the cheap energy supply was keeping them profitable and no amount of LNG would help with that.
In the short term this is of course not great for the German GDP (and company profits), but it forces them to innovate and switch to processes that can use renewable energy, so all in all that is probably a positive development.