Europe: Eni urges action to avert "looming threat" of gas shortage

SINCE the start of 2006, when Russia briefly withheld gas supplies to Ukraine in a dispute over pricing, the European Union has been obsessed with Russia's reliability – or not – as an energy supplier. A speech at an energy conference in Rome last month by Eni's chief executive, Paulo Scaroni, illustrated why. Scaroni said demand growth and the need to replace ageing power stations could lead to natural gas demand in 2020 being 40% higher than today. Meanwhile, domestic production in the European Union (EU) is expected to halve. The net result, he said, would be that Europe would need to import double the amount of gas that it does now – in other words, imports would need to rise from 300bn