TheChek News Flow

Lawmakers propose legislation spurred by outbreak of infection at center of last year’s infant-formula shortages

WASHINGTON—Baby-formula manufacturers would be required to notify regulators about contamination in their products in a wider range of circumstances, under bipartisan legislation introduced Tuesday.

The legislation is aimed at preventing and quickly halting any future outbreaks of cronobacter, the bacteria that sickened four babies and fueled last year’s shortage.

The bill from the top two lawmakers on the House Oversight’s health panel, Reps. Katie Porter (D., Calif.) and Lisa McClain (R., Mich.), would require formula manufacturers to notify the Food and Drug Administration within 24 hours if they find out their formula is contaminated during tests taken in the facility, according to the lawmakers’ offices. Under the legislation, regulators would then have 72 hours to contact the baby formula maker after being notified of the contamination.

Currently formula makers have to test samples of formula before it is distributed to make sure it isn’t contaminated and keep records, but they aren’t required to notify regulators unless they have reason to believe formula that has already been shipped out to stores is contaminated, according to an FDA spokesperson.

The bill “empowers the FDA and holds the agency accountable for getting answers from manufacturers, to give parents peace of mind and to prevent another bacterial outbreak from devolving into a disaster,” said Porter, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee’s Health Care and Financial Services panel.

The legislation targets a rare bipartisan area of agreement from a committee whose GOP leaders have largely focused on investigating the Biden administration.

Lawmakers from both parties expressed outrage at a pair of hearings held earlier this year examining the baby-formula recall and ensuing shortages that fueled anxiety in parents of young children, including members of Congress.

“This crisis was preventable. We saw failures occur that should have never been possible, and we cannot allow them to happen again,” McClain, the chairwoman of the subcommittee, said in a statement.

Last year’s nationwide baby-formula shortage accelerated following a recall sparked by the hospitalization of four infants, including two who later died, who contracted rare bacterial infections from cronobacter after being fed powdered baby formula made at the same Abbott Laboratories facility.

Abbott has said that it doesn’t believe the four infant illnesses were caused by contamination at its plant and that investigations conducted by the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the company itself didn’t find a definitive link between Abbott’s products and illnesses in children.

The FDA has also requested the authority from Congress to require manufacturers to report when formula tests positive for cronobacter, as part of the administration’s budget proposal.

Earlier this summer, federal regulators and state health officials worked together to strengthen data collection of cronobacter infections, adding them to the list of roughly 120 diseases tracked at the national level. That sets up a standardized process for states that choose to collect data around these infections to count them and send information to the CDC.

Research by property portal points to impact of higher borrowing costs on prospective homebuyers

UK house sales are on track for their slowest year in more than a decade, as higher mortgage rates and inflation hit the purchasing power of prospective homebuyers.

Some 1mn houses are set to be sold in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland this year, down one-fifth on 2022 and the lowest figure since 2012, according to research by property portal Zoopla. 

The decline follows four consecutive months of house price falls and is the latest sign of a slowdown in the property market, as buyers contend with steeper borrowing costs sparked by successive interest rate rises by the Bank of England.

“Clearly, the impact of higher interest rates and cost of living is affecting people’s desire to move home,” said Richard Donnell, head of research at Zoopla.

The study estimated a year-on-year drop of 28 per cent in mortgage-backed sales. By contrast, cash purchases were forecast to fall by 1 per cent compared with 2022, accounting for one in three sales.

Donnell said transaction volumes were “feeling the pinch, and it’s no surprise it’s the mortgage market where the biggest squeeze is being felt”.

The average 2-year fixed residential mortgage rate stands at 6.7 per cent, according to data provider Moneyfacts, near a 15-year high and well above the 3.95 per cent average in early August 2022.

Donnell said the resilience of cash transactions had been fuelled in part by house purchases by retirees, who had paid off mortgages and were seeking to downsize and free up cash in the face of higher living costs.

In a sign of relative resilience, UK house prices rose at a monthly rate of 0.1 per cent in the four weeks to August 20, the slowest pace since 2012, according to Zoopla’s own index.

“We haven’t had the price fall we need to make housing more affordable and encourage more [house sales],” said Donnell. “We are stuck and the prices are not falling as much.”

House prices as measured by the property portal are not, however, moving uniformly across the country. While they rose by 1.7 per cent in Scotland in July, they fell 1 per cent in London over the same period.

The report attributed the weaker demand in southern England to prospective buyers being priced out of the market owing to the need for bigger mortgages, deposits and incomes to make a purchase.

Zoopla said it expected mortgage rates to fall below 5 per cent later this year, but that the positive effects on buyers’ ability to complete transactions would not be felt until the first half of next year.

People awaiting sharper falls in mortgage rates may have “unrealistic” expectations, Donnell said, adding: “It could take a while for consumers to wake up to realise 4-5 per cent is going to be the new normal, not 2-3 per cent.”

New neutrino research may help answer the question of our existence

It is possible that the subatomic particles are the reason the Big Bang did not result in nothing

Trying to spot neutrinos is a bit like trying to catch moonbeams. The subatomic particles permeate the universe but, being near-massless and electrically neutral, they rarely interact with anything. In the seconds it takes you to read this sentence, trillions of these so-called ghost particles will have zipped through your body. 

Neutrinos are a new frontier in the quest to stress-test the Standard Model, the basic description of how the universe works. That is because the particles could illuminate one of the most fundamental mysteries in science: why, against expectation, does the universe exist? Two multinational experiments in Japan and the US may furnish answers over the coming decade — answers that could prove as unsettling as Einstein’s challenge to Newton’s law of gravity. 

According to the Standard Model, the Big Bang 13.8bn years ago should have created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, a mirror form of stuff in which every “antiparticle” has the same mass as its corresponding particle but the opposite electrical charge. Each should have cancelled each other out. Instead, here we are — along with other excess matter such as stars and galaxies. 

Neutrinos, commonly produced when atoms fuse together or break apart — in nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, stars (including the Sun) and exploding supernovae — have attracted suspicion as a possible explanation because they don’t quite fit the Standard Model.

“The Standard Model predicts that neutrinos don’t have mass but the reality is that they do,” explains Professor Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College London and author of The Universe in a Box. Incriminatingly, neutrinos may also violate the same rules of symmetry that predict equivalence between matter and anti-matter at the Big Bang. That kind of break in symmetry, Pontzen told me, “must have been present at some level in the early universe to explain why we end up with more matter than anti-matter”. Dark matter and hypothetical particles called axions, Pontzen adds, are other examples of cosmic symmetry-breaking.

Understanding neutrinos and their matching antiparticles, called antineutrinos, means finding them, a feat first accomplished in the 1950s. Today, there are detectors buried underneath mountains, down disused mines and even 1.5km down in the Antarctic ice. The surrounding rock, earth and ice filter out other particles, such as cosmic rays; the neutrinos race through unimpeded. On rare occasions, a single neutrino will hit an atom in the liquid-filled detector, producing a distinctive signal such as a flash of radiation. 

Decades of experiments have revealed that neutrinos and antineutrinos are shape-shifters, able to switch, or oscillate, between three different types or “flavours”. One theory is that these oscillations somehow provide a slender window for a surplus of matter. The switching will come under scrutiny by two next-generation facilities: Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (Dune) in the US. 

Hyper-Kamiokande, which is to start operating in 2027, will be a successor to the Super-Kamiokande detector, a shimmering chamber underneath a mountain near Kamioka in western Japan. Super-K, comprising 50,000 tonnes of pure water surrounded by 13,000 sensors, receives a neutrino beam generated in Tokai, nearly 300km to the east. It currently registers only about 30 neutrinos a day. Hyper-Kamiokande, with the UK among 21 participating countries, will be bigger, with five times the mass of water and many more sensors. 

Dune, meanwhile, is due to start operating in 2026 — the UK is one of around 30 countries signed up to the experiment. Dune will fire neutrinos from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to an underground facility 1,300km away in South Dakota. There are no tunnels; in both countries, the neutrinos — checked at the start and end of their journeys to sniff out oscillations — will travel underground through the earth. Separately, scientists in China plan to study neutrino flavours at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory in Guangdong province from next year.

We have come a long way since 1930, when Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed that, for cosmic equations to make sense, the neutrino must exist. It would be quite something to discover that it is only thanks to these shape-shifting ghosts that we ourselves do.

Race for bigger turbines has experts calling for slowdown in growth and greater standardisation

The 169 wind turbines spinning off the Yorkshire coast are an engineering feat: each eight-megawatt model erected by Danish developer Orsted can power a home for 24 hours with a single rotation of its 81-metre turbine blades. 

Dozens of miles north, rival wind farm developer SSE is already upping the ante with its newest turbines, where a single rotation of the 107-metre blade can power a home for two days.

The jump in turbine size in the offshore wind industry, where blades can reach higher than New York’s Rockefeller Center and provide electricity for millions of homes, reflects the fierce race for scale over the past decade or more.

The rapid pace of evolution spurred on by wind farm developers and turbine makers has helped push down costs and proved that the industry can play an important part in decarbonising the energy system. But critics fear the race may now be starting to do more harm than good, as supply chains struggle to catch up and questions over technical risk and profitability for turbine makers arise. 

“The acceleration in the cycles for developing new wind turbine models in recent years has not been helpful,” says Christoph Zipf, a spokesman for trade group WindEurope. “It needs to slow down.”

Many industry executives want an end to the era of turbine growth with a period of standardisation of turbine models seen as the best way to help developers meet rapid growth targets.

While a cap on turbine size has also been discussed seriously within the industry, many developers still find it hard to resist the lure of the higher efficiencies touted. Turbine producers also face continuing competition for larger machines, especially from Chinese rivals.

From the early models in the 1990s of less than one megawatt, turbines are now being developed with a capacity of 18 megawatts or more, with blades longer than football pitches supported by towers rising more than 100 metres above the water’s surface.

Getting more electricity from each turbine has helped push down the costs of energy from wind by 60 per cent during the decade to 2021, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. 

The rapid pace of development brings its challenges, however, for example for makers of the vessels installing the turbines as well as other parts of the supply chain that need to adapt to the huge increases in size and weight. 

“You are [now] talking about nacelles [part of the turbine] weighing 800 to 1,000 tonnes,” says Anders Nielsen, chief technology officer at leading turbine manufacturer Vestas. “You need to reinforce the quayside [to cope].”

According to a report from consultants Wood Mackenzie this month, about half of the world’s installation vessels are set to retire as they are not designed to cope with the newer turbine models, with about $13bn of investment needed for replacements.

But vessel owners have already been burnt by investing heavily in new models only to find they were quickly outgrown, according to Torgeir Ramstad, managing director in the installation division at offshore vessel owner Cyan Renewables. “We [Cyan] will only now build on the basis of long-term contracts from developers,” he said. 

The rapid pace of development means models are being introduced before the performance of existing models has been observed over the long term, raising questions over whether potential problems are understood.

“I don’t know of any other industry that’s pushed ahead at this pace in terms of bringing new models to market before there’s any real service experience on the previous levels,” said Professor Simon Hogg, who holds the Orsted chair in renewable energy at Durham university. “That has put a lot of risk into the industry.”

Renewable energy insurer GCube said in a report in May that machines larger than eight megawatts are reporting problems more quickly than their smaller counterparts. 

Meanwhile, finances in the industry are under strain. Turbine manufacturers have borne steep losses over the past few years as they try to churn out new models while keeping prices down, and grapple with warranty provisions. 

Developers are now also under pressure from inflation and high interest rates. Swedish developer Vattenfall in July halted a new project in the North Sea, while Iberdrola and Shell are also exiting agreements in the US.

Slowing down the development of new turbine models and instead focusing on standardising existing models may now be the best way for the industry to grow and meet stretching clean energy targets, some believe.

Jochen Eickholt, chief executive of turbine maker Siemens Gamesa, said that while size increase is technically possible, “much larger turbines would need a proper infrastructure that is not there yet, including ports and vessels”. 

Siemens Gamesa is battling technical problems with its latest onshore wind turbines as well as challenges ramping up offshore wind. Eickholt added: “The priority should be to guarantee a sustainable and profitable future for the business while delivering the surging targets around the world.”

Ben Backwell, chief executive of the Global Wind Energy Council industry body, believes that the industry should now roll out existing models at industrial scale, saying this would allow companies to take advantage of the investment in models so far.

“It is also important that projects can benefit from investments in installation equipment and infrastructure such as vessels and cranes without these becoming constantly obsolete due to continual increases in turbine size,” he said.

Focusing on existing models is easier said than done, however, given the fierce competition in the market. “If General Electric [comes out with a larger model], Siemens Gamesa will immediately counter that. And then Vestas will be under pressure to counter that,” said Shashi Barla, head of research for renewable energy at the consultancy Brinckmann.

A race for size among Chinese manufacturers adds to that competitive pressure. Chinese offshore turbine manufacturers could start to make more significant inroads into the western offshore market as costs in the US and Europe rise, said Barla.

Ramstad, at Cyan, believes a cap on turbine size would ensure standardisation, preventing the market from overshooting. “We desperately need this electricity, and the way to build fast is to industrialise, streamline, standardise,” he said.

Wood Mackenzie said in its report that a temporary cap, lasting at least 10 years, would “give suppliers and investors confidence in their new investment”.

“Ultimately the most important factor is not the size of the cap but that a cap is imposed,” it added.

Many players in the sector do not back a cap, with some concerned that it could have unintended consequences. “What we need to see is progressive evolution rather than revolution and avoid putting measures in place that could potentially stifle innovation,” said Rob Anderson, project director for Vattenfall’s wind projects off Norfolk.

Iberdrola, one of the world’s largest wind farm developers, backs a slowdown in new models although it does not believe a cap is necessary. With improved profit margins in the future, “we are confident that the industry will experience a new momentum and bigger sizes will be developed”, it said.

Nielsen at Vestas is of a similar view, emphasising the need for responsible development. “The only way that can actually attend to the market demand is to slow down the growth of turbines,” he said, adding: “This industry needs to mature and everyone has to make money in the supply chain to make it last.”

Why autumn is the time to visit Switzerland

Tourists flock to the country in winter and summer but locals know the Alps are at their best when the larch trees turn gold

Aluminium price slump ‘nearing a bottom’ as clean energy demand rises

Metal has fallen 40% from last year’s high amid worries about global growth

A slump in aluminium prices this year reflecting a global economic slowdown may be “nearing a bottom”, according to traders, producers and analysts, who are growing increasingly bullish about demand for the metal from burgeoning clean technologies.

The aluminium futures benchmark on the London Metal Exchange has fallen nearly a fifth since its January peak, and more than 40 per cent from last year’s highs — largely due to economic weakness in Europe and the US, and poor construction demand in China.

But many producers and traders are growing increasingly bullish in the medium-term, forecasting growing demand for the metal from makers of electric vehicles and solar panels. Aluminium prices this month experienced their largest contango since the financial crisis, meaning metal bought today is at a discount to future prices. This reflects weak spot demand, as well as the expectation that future prices will be higher than today.

“I think we are nearer the bottom of the price cycle [for aluminium],” said Colin Hamilton, analyst at BMO. “If demand continues to improve over the coming weeks, we may be past the nadir in 2023 pricing.”

The benchmark three-month future contract on the LME is currently about $2170 a tonne, down from more than $3,840 a tonne at last year’s peak.

One trader at a large trading house expects prices to bottom at about $100-$150 from their current levels, and rise in the long term.

Used in everything from buildings, beverage cans, solar panels, automobiles and aeroplanes, aluminium is often a proxy for industrial activity.

“We are having a cool-down of the economy, and aluminium products are very closely linked to GDP across the globe,” said Pål Kildemo, chief financial officer at Norsk Hydro. “Europe is driving the weakness in demand,” he added.

The company, which is the fourth-largest aluminium producer outside China, has pushed back its forecast for a recovery in demand, which it now expects in the first quarter of 2024 at the earliest.

Likewise, consultancy Cru has lowered its global consumption forecast for this year and next, saying that prices have further to fall, while several major banks have cut their price forecasts in recent weeks. 

“There is a global surplus of just over 800,000 tonnes this year, and this is weighing on the price,” said Ross Strachan, aluminium analyst at Cru. “All the major regions are seeing softer than expected demand growth.”

But there are also signs that the gloom may be beginning to lift, as a period of running down global aluminium stocks appears to be coming to an end.

China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of aluminium, has emerged as a relative bright spot, as growing spending on clean energy infrastructure compensates for waning appetite in the highly indebted Chinese property sector.

“Chinese demand is running at a record high,” said Graeme Train, head of metals research at trading house Trafigura, which is among the world’s largest metals traders. “Prices coming lower has also helped trigger some restocking demand.”

China’s stimulus in energy infrastructure and strength in the manufacturing sector have more than made up for the weak real estate market, he said. 

Demand from the solar market is particularly strong: solar farms typically use aluminium for frames and mounting solar panels. Electric vehicles also require more aluminium than traditional internal combustion engine cars, another medium-term source of demand growth.

In July, China’s imports of aluminium rose 20 per cent compared with a year earlier.

However, this strong demand has so far had muted impact on global prices, as China’s domestic production of aluminium is also rising and close to record highs.

Those who are bullish on aluminium in the long term, including Swiss trading house Glencore, which is expanding its alumina refining and bauxite mining operations in a $1.1bn deal with Hydro earlier this year.

Outside China, demand from south-east Asia and the US has helped to support the market, but Europe’s appetite for aluminium has been much weaker.

Even though about half of Europe’s smelting capacity has closed due to high energy prices, the weakness in the European market has far outstripped the decline in production. European demand for extrusions, a finished type of aluminium used in cars and appliances, in the second quarter of this year were 23 per cent below the same period last year, according to Hydro.

At the same time, in Europe debate is heating up over the role that Russian aluminium plays in the market. European producers such as Hydro are calling for Russian material to be banned, but European governments have so far been reluctant to take that step.

Mid-sized manufacturers in Europe say free trade in aluminium needs to be maintained. In July a letter from five European business associations called on LME to resist calls to impose sanctions on Russian material, saying that doing so would hurt small and medium-sized downstream manufacturers.

Some traders say the current contango in LME aluminium is partly due to the build-up of Russian stocks in LME warehouses, because arbitrage traders are unwilling to get stuck holding Russian material. High financing costs are also contributing, as they make it more expensive to hold metal.

But even the gloomiest market participants expect that today’s weak demand won’t persist for ever.

“Over time we expect this to change,” says Kildemo of Hydro. “The outlook for aluminium looks much more interesting in a midterm perspective, than it has been for a long time.”

Annual business survey finds concern over country’s future without Russian gas

Nearly a third of German industrial companies are planning to boost production abroad rather than at home amid increasing concern over the country’s future without Russian gas, according to a closely watched annual survey.

The annual “Energy Transition Barometer” by the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) found that 32 per cent of companies surveyed favoured investment abroad over domestic expansion. The figure was double the 16 per cent in last year’s survey.

The chamber asked 3,572 of its members about the effect of energy issues on their business outlook as Europe’s largest economy attempts to transition away from using gas and other fossil fuels. 

Achim Dercks, the chamber’s deputy managing director, said “large parts” of the German economy were concerned about a lack of energy supply “in the medium and long term”.

Germany was long heavily dependent on Russia for gas, as leaders in business and politics largely ignored signs of the country’s increasingly hostile military ambitions, including its 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Just before the war in Ukraine began last year, more than half of the gas consumed in Germany came from Russia.

Germany in April shut down its last remaining nuclear power plants and has said it aims to reach carbon neutrality by 2045. The rollout of green energy infrastructure has lagged behind, however.

The DIHK pointed in particular to challenges around the expansion of Germany’s power grid. Three-quarters of the 12,000 kilometres of new power lines needed to support the country’s electric ambitions had not even been approved for construction, it said.

The survey found that 52 per cent of companies responding thought that Germany’s energy transition was having a negative impact on business. The figure was the highest captured by the barometer since publication started in 2012.

The findings reflect the concerns cited by German chemical giant BASF when it chose China as the location for €10bn of state of the art petrochemicals plants it is currently building. It mentioned ready access to large amounts of environmentally-friendly energy as one of the reasons for the decision. At the same time, it announced a “permanent” downsizing at its headquarters in Ludwigshafen.

“If the conditions in Europe are not good, we will try to decarbonise in other regions faster,” BASF chief executive Martin Brudermüller had said when the company announced its most recent earnings in July.

“We get great support in China,” he said.

He added that companies were also looking to invest more in the US, pointing to the country’s Inflation Reduction Act as motivation. The act, which offers $369bn in subsidies for domestic clean energy investments in the US, provided a “business case for transformation”, Brudermüller said.

The DIHK survey reinforced complaints by BASF and others about conditions for investment in Germany.

Brudermüller pointed out in July that production by Germany’s chemical industry had dropped nearly a fifth in the past year. He attributed the decline partially to lower sales and lagging competitiveness among the German companies that are the chemical industry’s customers.

Companies such as BASF have increasingly been calling for Berlin to subsidise energy prices for heavy industry, but the issue has caused friction within Germany’s three-way coalition.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party recently proposed a 5 cent per kilowatt hour cap for companies that have been particularly badly hit by the volatility of prices. However, the idea has largely been rejected by its liberal coalition partner.

The DIHK on Tuesday said that a guarantee of low energy prices was one way to stop industrial companies from “limiting their production in Germany, or even relocating completely”.

Belgium and Spain are world’s second and third-biggest importers of Russian LNG this year

The EU is set to import record volumes of liquefied natural gas from Russia this year, despite aiming for the bloc to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels by 2027.

In the first seven months of this year, Belgium and Spain were the second and third-biggest buyers of Russian LNG behind China, according to analysis of industry data by the NGO Global Witness.

Overall, EU imports of the super-chilled gas were up 40 per cent between January and July this year compared with the same period in 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The jump comes from a low base as the EU did not import significant amounts of LNG before the war in Ukraine due to its reliance on piped gas from Russia.

But the rise is much sharper than the global average increase in imports of Russian LNG, which was 6 per cent over the same period, Global Witness said.

The NGO’s analysis is based on data from industry analytics company Kpler, which showed that the EU is importing about 1.7 per cent more Russian LNG than it did when imports hit a record high last year.

Global Witness said the cost of the LNG imported from January to July at spot market prices amounted to €5.29bn.

“It’s shocking that countries in the EU have worked so hard to wean themselves off piped Russian fossil gas only to replace it with the shipped equivalent,” said Jonathan Noronha-Gant, senior fossil fuel campaigner at Global Witness. “It doesn’t matter if it comes from a pipeline or a boat — it still means European companies are sending billions to [Vladimir] Putin’s war chest.”

Most of the Russian volumes come from the Yamal LNG joint venture, which is majority-owned by the Russian company Novatek. Other stakes are held by France’s Total Energies, China’s CNPC and a Chinese state fund. The venture is exempt from export duties but is subject to income tax.

As well as resulting in billions of euros in revenues going to Russia at a time when the EU continues to tighten its sanctions regime against Moscow, the import levels leave the EU exposed to any sudden decision by the Kremlin to cut supplies as it did for piped gas last year.

Alex Froley, senior LNG analyst at consultancy ICIS, said that “long-term buyers in Europe say they will keep taking contracted volumes unless it is banned by politicians”. He added that an EU ban on imports would cause some disruptions to shipping as global trade patterns would need to be rearranged, “but ultimately Europe could find other suppliers and Russia other buyers”.

Belgium imports large volumes of Russian LNG because its port of Zeebrugge is one of the few European points of transshipment for LNG from ice-class tankers used in the high north to regular cargo vessels.

Spain’s utility Naturgy and France’s Total also have continuing contracts for large quantities of Russian LNG, analysts said.

EU policymakers have been urging European companies not to buy Russian LNG.

Spanish energy minister Teresa Ribera, whose government is chairing the six-month rotating presidency of the EU, said in March that LNG should be sanctioned, saying that the situation was “absurd”.

Kadri Simson, the EU’s energy commissioner, has said that the bloc “can and should get rid of Russian gas completely as soon as possible, still keeping in mind our security of supply”.

EU officials have pointed to an overall effort to phase out Russian fossil fuels by 2027, but warned that an outright ban on LNG imports risked prompting an energy crisis akin to last year when EU gas prices hit record highs of more than €300 per megawatt hour.

One official said that despite European gas storage containers being more than 90 per cent full ahead of winter, there was still “a lot of nervousness” should there be any further cuts to supplies.

Russian LNG accounted for 21.6mn, or 16 per cent, of the EU’s total 133.5mn cubic metres of LNG imports (equivalent to 82bn cubic metres of natural gas) between January and July, Kpler data shows, making it the bloc’s second-biggest supplier of the liquid fuel after the US.

In March, energy ministers introduced a clause to new rules governing the bloc’s gas market that would allow governments to ban Russian and Belarusian companies booking capacity on EU LNG infrastructure in an effort to find a legal way to prevent imports.

But the proposal must first be negotiated with the European parliament before it can take effect.

Henning Gloystein, director of energy, climate and resources at Eurasia Group, said the likelihood of governments having to order industry shutdowns because of gas shortages this winter was “near zero”.

The EU must cut demand by a further 10 per cent, Gloystein added. “If we don’t structurally reduce gas consumption by 10 to 15 per cent, we are at risk of repeating this race [for supplies] every year.”