GoKawiilRussian gas fell from 45% of EU imports to about 12%, but the US now supplies roughly two-thirds of Europe's LNG and 89% of Germany's, with $750 billion committed through 2028.
Gas set the price of electricity in 15% of hours in Spain this year against 89% in Italy, and when Hormuz closed, Spain grew 0.7% while Italy got flagged as the eurozone's most exposed economy.
Every euro of EU output now takes 44% less energy than it did in 1995, and more than a third of that improvement has landed since 2019.
Brent is sitting a touch above $104 this morning, down slightly from yesterday's surge. The Strait of Hormuz, which used to move something like a fifth of the world's oil and LNG before the war, has been effectively shut since March. Saudi output dropped around 1.9 million barrels a day in August, tanker rates are breaking records, and the EIA doesn't see Middle East production back near pre-conflict levels until the second quarter of 2027.
Meanwhile, the European Union imports 57 percent of the energy it consumes and spent €340 billion on fossil fuel imports last year. By every rule of thumb we've leaned on for the last fifty years, Europe is the casualty in this story. The one that gets wrecked.
Except it's not getting wrecked…
The Commission trimmed its 2026 growth forecast back in May, from 1.5 percent down to 1.1, with a rebound to 1.4 percent penciled in for next year. Unemployment holds around 6 percent across the whole window.
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So the world's single most important energy chokepoint closes, Brent runs up 58 percent year on year, and the bill comes to three tenths of a percentage point.
My takeaway here isn't that that's a continent falling apart…it's that it's a continent that’s spent twenty years quietly installing insulation and now it's getting to see whether it works.
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