Europe's adaptation to the energy crisis: reshaped gas supply–transmission–consumption structures and driving factors from 2022 to 2024

Abstract. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia triggered a significant energy crisis in the EU27 (27 EU member countries) and UK (hereafter EU27&UK), leading to profound changes in their natural gas supply, transmission, and consumption dynamics. To analyze those pattern shifts, we first update our natural gas supply dataset, EUGasSC, with daily country- and sector-specific supply sources. We then provide a newly constructed daily intra-EU (European Union) natural gas transmission dataset, EUGasNet, with specified supply sources utilizing the ENTSOG (European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas) and EUGasSC data. To further understand the economic and climatic impacts, we finally developed EUGasImpact, a daily dataset with sector-specific driving factors of consumption changes based on change attribution models using multiple open datasets. Those datasets are available on the Zenodo platform: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11175364 (Zhou et al., 2024). On the supply side, Russian gas supply to the EU27&UK was cut by 87.8 % (976.8 TW h per winter) during the post-invasion winters compared to the previous winters. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports became the largest gas supply source, rising from 20.7 % to 37.5 % of the total gas supply. Our intra-EU gas transmission analysis showed that the gas transmission network was adjusted to mitigate the large gas shortfalls in Germany and distribute LNG arrivals. Total gas consumption fell by 19.0 %, which was driven by (1) consumer behavioral changes in household heating (contributed to 29 % of the total reduction; the following numbers are also percentage contributions to the total reduction); (2) drops in industrial production (25 %); (3) heating drops due to the warmer winter temperatures (11 %); (4) shifts towards renewable electricity including wind, solar, and hydro (10 %); (5) a decline in gas-powered electricity generation (9 %); (6) adoption of energy-efficient heat pumps for industrial gas heating (4 %); (7) shifts towards non-renewable electricity including coal, oil, and nuclear (1 %); and (8) other unmodeled factors (11 %). We evaluated the benefits and costs associated with these pattern changes and discussed whether these changes would potentially lead to long-term structural changes in the EU energy dynamics. Our datasets and these insights can provide valuable perspectives for understanding the consequences of this energy crisis and the challenges to future energy security in the EU.