How Europe is reviving fossil fuel

Athens, Paris, Madrid, Rome The stop applies from this Thursday: EU countries are no longer allowed to import coal from Russia. At midnight, the transitional period for the coal embargo against Russia, which the EU states adopted as part of the fifth sanctions package in April, ends. The sanction is another incentive for Europe to reactivate its own coal industry. Above all, however, it is the gas gap that is fueling the debate about a renaissance of fossil fuels.

After the attack on Ukraine, the Russian state-owned company Gazprom reduced its gas supplies to Europe. Since then, the states of the EU have had a problem: Natural gas is irreplaceable in many industrial processes and is therefore considered too valuable in the current crisis to be burned to generate electricity. In the short term, the easiest way to replace gas in power generation is with lignite and hard coal.