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Bigger than the Berlin Airlift: How NATO’s natural gas shut down a key Russian pipeline 

Just a few weeks into 2025, two significant efforts to stifle Russia’s energy revenues have already taken place. Both carry major energy security and geopolitical ramifications. 

On January 10, the US Treasury Department announced the most significant sanctions on Russian oil since 2014. And on January 1, over the objections of Moscow, a contract allowing for pipeline deliveries of Russian natural gas across Ukraine and into the European Union expired.  

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To be sure, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, gas volumes along this pipeline route had already plummeted to a fraction of their historic levels. But the expiration of the transit deal has allowed Ukraine to finally shut off one of the few remaining connections between the European Union (EU) and Russia’s gas sector—and put further economic pressure on the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war. 

Before the 2022 invasion, Russia’s share of the European gas market stood at more than 40 percent. Since then, it has fallen to less than 15 percent, and the expiration of the Ukraine transit deal will move the EU closer to its 2027 goal of ending all Russian gas imports. 

This is an astonishing achievement, both in technical and economic terms. It would not have been possible without close coordination between members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was originally formed in 1949 to defend against Russian expansion during the Cold War. 

In particular, two founding members of NATO—the United States and Norway—answered the call to defend Europe against Russian energy aggression. The United States surged exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and Norway ramped up pipeline shipments at a dramatic pace. Barely 18 months after the Russian invasion, the United States was providing almost 20 percent of the EU’s gas imports from across the Atlantic Ocean and Norway was providing more than 30 percent. 

The speed and determination of this effort was reminiscent of the 1948 Berlin Airlift, but on a much larger scale. Instead of supporting a single city after it was blockaded by the Soviet Union, the United States, Norway, and other gas-producing nations came to the aid of an entire continent of 450 million people. 

This has not been easy or cheap for the economies of Europe. But the data show it could have been much worse—without the US shale revolution, Europe could have been at Russia’s mercy and a very different geopolitical map might have emerged. 

A few months into the conflict, European natural gas prices climbed to record levels, roughly five times the price recorded at the start of 2022. But thanks to a surge of imports from NATO allies and conservation measures that limited demand, the wholesale price of gas in Europe had returned to pre-invasion levels by early 2023. Today, European gas prices are 80–90 percent lower than their record levels. 

For this reason, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently called for continued growth in US LNG shipments to Europe. American LNG is “cheaper” than other sources of natural gas and “brings down our energy prices,” von der Leyen said in November after a call with incoming US President Donald Trump. 

Another major benefit of the move away from Russian natural gas is connected to climate change.  

Natural gas produces roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned to generate electricity. But the climate benefits of natural gas can be eroded by fugitive emissions of methane during production, processing, transportation, and other points along the supply chain. 

In North America, there are strong environmental regulations, efficient production practices, and a series of technologies to detect and reduce fugitive methane emissions. Those technologies include ground-level monitors; drone surveys; aircraft sensors; satellites; vapor-recovery units; low- and zero-emission pneumatic controllers; and real-time autonomous systems that can detect potential methane releases, throttle back production, and alert field crews to investigate. 

By comparison, Russia’s oil and natural gas infrastructure is notoriously leaky, producing around 50 percent more fugitive methane than the United States per unit of gas produced, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Norway’s gas is even cleaner, with virtually no fugitive methane emissions, says the IEA. 

When the full-scale war in Ukraine began, Russian President Vladimir Putin believed he could use energy as a weapon to threaten Europe and NATO. Instead, in less than three years, Europe pivoted to cleaner and more secure energy sources, strengthening the transatlantic alliance and benefiting the climate. 

Make no mistake, many challenges remain and there is much work to be done. But this moment in geopolitics, energy security and environmental progress—which was unthinkable just a few years ago—deserves to be celebrated. 

Morgan Bazilian is the director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines and a former lead energy specialist at the World Bank.  

Greg Clough is the institute’s deputy director.  

Simon Lomax is the director of the institute’s Accelerated Methane Reduction Initiative. 

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Image: LNG tanker off the coast of Norway. (Hannes Grobe, Wikimedia Commons) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gas-tanker_hg.jpg