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CIAO DATE: 6/5/2006
How Dependent Should We Be on Russian Oil and Gas?
Keith Smith
April 2006
Abstract
While Europe is now re-evaluating its growing dependency on Russian energy imports, the U.S. continues to count on increased Russian supplies to fill the energy gap created by declining domestic and Canadian production, and by political instability in Venezuela, Nigeria, and the Middle East. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has stated that the U.S. will import 10 to 20 percent of its natural gas needs from Russia in the next few years.
Increasing our dependency on an authoritarian Russia that uses energy to regain control over its neighbors cannot be good policy, particularly when the Putin government continues to centralize control over energy resources in the Kremlin and when the business climate in Russia becomes less, rather than more, transparent. EU countries and the United States previously ignored the petro-politics of the Kremlin as long as they were confined to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, but now it is now clear that the policy is being used in an attempt to influence U.S. and Western European security policies.
