Weaponising gas

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention and there is no starker example of this than when the grim reality of war must be faced.

The collective effort to face adversity, to survive and then rebuild has acted as a catalyst for progress that might otherwise have taken decades.

The Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 but it was the urgent need to provide antibiotics to World War II soldiers in the field that accelerated its development.

In June 1942 the US Government had enough penicillin to treat ten patients – in just two years they were able to supply 2.3 million doses for Allied troops destined for the D-Day landings.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has shocked the world which, perhaps complacently, thought a superpower waging war in Europe was something we could safely confine to history.

The death and destruction that has ensued has led to soul searching on the part of Western Governments, how could this have been allowed to happen? how can it be stopped? and what lessons can be learned for the future.

There lurks in the background the nagging worry that a factor in Putin’s decision to invade was a belief that a dependency on Russian gas would deter many countries from punitive retaliatory action.

More than 40% of gas consumed in the EU comes from Russia though the dependency is far greater in some countries that others. France gets a quarter of its gas from Russia, Germany and Italy nearly half, Finland and Latvia over 90%.

Whilst the current plan to go zero carbon by 2050 would see the removal of reliance on Russian gas by 2030, events in the Ukraine have led to a re-think and a resolve that this can be done far quicker.

The International Energy Agency has drawn up a ten point plan on how this might be achieved, focussing on short and medium term measures.

In the short term, building up Europe’s storage of gas will ensure countries cannot be held to ransom, whilst accelerating installation of clean energy sources in homes, including specifically the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps, will bring zero carbon far closer to reality than the current three decade timeframe.

Removing fossil fuels from the energy chain is no longer a pipedream and will offer powerful protection from economic blackmail. The speed at which we achieve this is down to the will of Government.