Portfolio.hu: This is why more Russian gas is a bad idea

The price of natural gas is higher in European countries where the share of Russian import is high. Most likely this is not because of import dependency, but Russian dependency. If Eastern European countries want to buy cheap gas, they need to connect to the Western-European gas market: there Russian gas has to compete with other sources, leading to much lower prices, energy blog barrelperday.com said in an analysis on Friday.

How can Central and Eastern European countries get cheaper natural gas? First it may sound reasonable to be on good terms with their biggest provider, Russia, and try to achieve a good deal with them. Or is it? To check this, we took a look at natural gas prices in the EU: how does import dependency and dependency on Russian gas in particular affect gas prices?

For 17 EU countries, the first chart shows import dependency and gas prices: the horizontal axis shows the share of import in gas consumption, and the vertical axis shows the wholesale price during the first 4 months of 2013.
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