The Strange New Geography of European Gas

On a grey morning at the Maasvlakte 2 terminal in the Port of Rotterdam, an enormous tanker is approaching its berth. The vessel is roughly 290 metres long — close to three football pitches placed end to end — and its hull rides high in the water despite being heavily laden. Inside its insulated tanks, held at minus one hundred sixty-two degrees Celsius, are approximately 165,000 cubic metres of liquefied natural gas. When this cargo is regasified and injected into the European gas network, it will be enough to heat several million European homes for a day, or to fuel a significant share of European industrial consumption.

Five years ago, the arrival of this ship would have been an unremarkable event. Five years ago, Europe’s gas economy ran primarily on pipeline imports, and ships like this one were a useful supplement but not a structural pillar. Today, the same arrival is one moment in a continuously running flow that has reshaped the entire continental energy system — quietly, expensively, and at a pace that would have seemed impossible to nearly every European energy expert as recently as January 2022.

This essay is about that reshaping. It is the story of how Europe’s gas map has been redrawn since 2022, why the changes have been more profound than they first appeared, and why an ordinary morning in Rotterdam now has direct consequences for industrial workers in Slovakia, for households in Hungary, and for natural gas traders in Vienna and Zug.

The geopolitical disruption that began with the war in Ukraine in February 2022 had consequences for European gas that unfolded in stages rather than all at once. Through the spring of 2022, Russian pipeline gas continued to flow at substantially reduced levels. Through the summer, the flows reduced further as Russia and various European customers entered into commercial and political disputes about pricing, payment currencies, and contractual interpretations. In late August, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline — which had been the largest single conduit of Russian pipeline gas into Western Europe — ceased operating. In September, that pipeline (and its parallel Nord Stream 2, which had been completed but never commercially commissioned) was physically damaged in a sabotage incident, the responsibility for which remains the subject of investigation. From late 2022 onward, the volume of Russian pipeline gas flowing to Europe collapsed to a fraction of its previous level. The remaining transit of Russian gas through Ukraine ceased at the start of 2025, when the transit agreement expired — closing the corridor that had defined the region’s supply for half a century.

The European Union and its member states responded with a combination of policy measures and market adjustments. Some of these measures were dramatic. New LNG receiving terminals were commissioned at extraordinary speed in Germany — at Wilhelmshaven and Brunsbüttel — using floating regasification units that could begin operation within months rather than the years typically required for fixed terminals. Existing terminals in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain operated at maximum utilisation. Storage facilities, which had historically been managed primarily on a commercial basis, came under new regulatory requirements: the European Union introduced binding storage-filling targets — initially at least ninety percent of capacity by early November — which were substantially met in the years that followed. The regime has since been extended to the end of 2027 and made more flexible: the ninety percent target remains, but it may now be met at any point between 1 October and 1 December, with a deviation of up to ten percentage points where market conditions are unfavourable — which the Commission may increase by a further five percentage points through a delegated act — and the intermediate targets have become indicative.

The combined effect was that European gas consumption was supplied, by 2024, from a profoundly different mix of sources than in 2021. Gas of Russian origin, which had accounted for roughly forty-five percent of EU imports, fell in aggregate to approximately twenty percent — and within that residual share, an increasing portion arrived in liquefied rather than pipeline form. Norwegian pipeline gas, which had previously been the second-largest source, became the largest single source, supplying roughly thirty percent of EU imports. LNG imports, primarily from the United States and Qatar but also from a range of other suppliers, rose from roughly twenty percent of imports to approximately thirty-five to forty percent. Algerian pipeline gas and smaller flows from Azerbaijan and other origins made up the balance.

The decline continued in 2025. After Ukrainian transit ended in January, the Russian share fell to around twelve percent of EU gas imports; of that, pipeline gas accounted for about six percent, now exclusively via the TurkStream route, with the remainder arriving as liquefied natural gas.

This was an enormous restructuring, accomplished over approximately twenty-four months, in a system that most observers had previously considered structurally inflexible.

For most of the post-Cold War period, Central Europe — the region encompassing Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and several neighbouring markets — sat at the receiving end of the eastern pipeline corridor. Gas arrived from Russia via Ukraine, entered the CEGH and connected national systems, and was distributed to industrial customers, district heating utilities, and households across the region. The infrastructure, the commercial relationships, and the regulatory frameworks had all developed within this configuration.

The restructuring since 2022 has been particularly consequential for this region. The flow direction has reversed: gas now arrives in Central Europe primarily from the west and northwest, having travelled from LNG terminals in the Netherlands and Germany, and from Norwegian pipeline imports. The cost of bringing gas to Central Europe has changed accordingly, because the gas now travels longer distances through the European pipeline network from its point of entry to its point of consumption. Storage facilities in Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary, which had historically been filled from the east, are now filled primarily from the west. Trading patterns at the CEGH have evolved to reflect these new realities.

For energy trading houses active in Central Europe — including SANIA Power AG and its Slovak subsidiary, both of which are CEGH members — the period since 2022 has been one of significant operational adjustment. New supply patterns required new commercial relationships, new contractual structures, and new approaches to balancing and storage. The trading function in this transformed market is fundamentally the same as it was before 2022, but the underlying physical and contractual reality has shifted, and the work of staying current with that reality is continuous.

The reshaping of European gas geography is not complete. Additional LNG terminal capacity is under construction in several countries. New cross-border interconnection projects are advancing. Storage strategies are being refined. And the political direction has now been fixed in law: in January 2026 the European Union adopted Regulation (EU) 2026/261, which progressively prohibits imports of Russian liquefied and pipeline natural gas: the prohibition became applicable in March 2026, with transition periods for existing contracts — LNG under short-term contracts expiring on 25 April 2026, pipeline gas under short-term contracts on 17 June 2026, long-term LNG contracts on 1 January 2027, and long-term pipeline contracts on 30 September 2027. The alternative date of 1 November 2027 applies only in a Member State for which the European Commission, by an implementing decision adopted no later than 15 September 2027, confirms a risk of missing the 2027 underground-gas-storage filling target, provided the contractual basis is demonstrated to the authorising authorities. The role of natural gas in the longer-term European energy transition remains under active debate — with some scenarios envisaging significant gas demand reduction through electrification and efficiency, and others reserving a substantial long-term role for natural gas (and, eventually, low-carbon gases such as hydrogen and biomethane) in industrial processes, district heating, and back-up power generation.

For the moment, the practical reality is that European gas now arrives primarily from a different geographic direction than it did five years ago, that the price-setting mechanisms are now centred at TTF rather than at the older Russian-pipeline-linked benchmarks, and that the commercial relationships of every European gas market participant have been reshaped accordingly. The map has been redrawn, and the new map will continue to evolve.