More pain for EuropeGazprom announced that it has cut off natural deliveries to to the French company Engie for non payment due to a contractual dispute and under Russian law it cannot supply any gas until it gets paid. This means that the supplies of natural gas are halted until the contract dispute is settled.
Who is Engie?
They are the second largest natural gas transportation company in Europe and the largest gas distribution company in Europe. They also have a large LNG capacity as well as renewable energy capacity for their production of electricity.
Without doing a deep dive into their financials it is not clear how much they are reliant on Gazprom but I think that we can safely say that the impact of the Gazprom move will have a big impact on natural gas supply in Europe and electricity production in Europe until the dispute is settled.
Either way we are likely to see natural gas prices and electricity prices in Europe rise even further until the dispute is settled and probably afterward if they have to pay Gazprom more for the natural gas adding to the inflationary pressures there..
Will be interesting to see how long it takes before the blackmail by Gazprom pays off or in other words, Engie caves. My gut says that it might take a while since they are a large company and have market power to perhaps increase their LNG deliveries. As well the company operates internationally as well which will not be affected by the Gazprom move. Plus they will be able to make more money from gauging their existing customers in Europe.
Right now Engie says they have lots of gas in storage and are talking to Algeria about increasing LNG deliveries. In the meantime, the French Prime Minister has urged businesses to cut their natural gas consumption this winter.
How will this affect oil prices?
Difficult to say but one possibility is as follows...
The value of the Euro relative to the Us dollar could fall especially if the ECB can't raise interest rates due to recession concerns and the US Fed keeps raising US rates. If this happens there will be downward pressure on the oil price.
Not clear that this will necessarily increase the demand for oil. Perhaps Migraine has this figured out.
Trying figure out how to put all the pieces together is like doing a thousand piece puzzle on the dining room table.
Let the games begin!!