“A European gas purchasing center would respond to Gazprom’s export monopoly”

Tribune. The events in Ukraine have just given concrete meaning to Europe’s energy dependence. The threat of cutting off the gas is like nuclear deterrence: you can’t use the bomb, but it’s there, weighing on people’s consciences and behaviors.

Europe discovers to what extent it has become dependent on Russian gas, through the cries of alarm from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the reluctance of Germany to displease its powerful supplier. Already in 2005 and 2009 the Russian-Ukrainian gas disputes over gas transit had caused concern.

Now that Europe has demonstrated its ability to overcome its divisions, it is an opportunity to discuss the project of a gas purchasing center to respond to the situation of asymmetry which confronts the multiplicity of importers with the monopoly of Gazprom, which, much more than just a giant company, is the very incarnation of the Russian State, of which it remains one of the sole attributes of its past power, the major instrument of its foreign policy and its main financial resource.

Command efficiency

After the First World War, the 1928 laws passed under the III^e Republic establishing a state monopoly on the import of oil demonstrated the effectiveness of an interventionist oil security policy.

Devoid of deposits on its metropolitan territory, the State has been able to establish a legal regime subjecting oil imports to authorization. France, despite its geological handicap, has thus been able to acquire powerful oil and gas companies, public and private, which have taken their rightful place in the group of world majors.

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The appropriate response to a sales monopoly is, in effect, a purchase “monopsony”, say the economists, i.e. a centralized coordination of gas purchase contracts allowing European gas companies to regroup to negotiate with supplier countries and develop access route diversification infrastructure.

A useful reference in Community law is the supply agency set up in 1960 by Euratom, Europe’s other, now somewhat forgotten, “founding treaty”, concluded in the context of concerns regarding the security of supply born of decolonization, which attributed exceptional interventionist powers delegated to operators placed under the control of the Agency.

An agreement, authorized and regulated

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