In fact, even now, I have not understood why the EU sanctions on Russia have no bottom line, and some measures clearly know that they are harmful to others and themselves, or they still have to be hard, knowing that this is a trap of the United States, and they must also drill into it.
Some time ago, the grace period for buying coal from Russia was 120 days, so there was a recent EU frenzied purchase from the world, importing 809,000 tons of coal from the United States in March, 1.3 million tons of coal from Colombia, and 287,000 tons of coal from South Africa. Total imports increased by 40.5% year-on-year.
So where is the EU likely to buy the most in the future? Africa, for example, recently said south African coal producers have run out of capacity in Europe.
In terms of production rankings, the United States exports the most, followed by South Africa and Colombia. The reason why it is bought from South Africa is because it is cheap, according to the soaring number of families in March, colombian coal is a little more expensive than South Africa, and the United States is more than twice as expensive.
Even so, the import price of coal is much more expensive than the original purchase from Russia, and the direct cost will be spread on industrial production and power generation, and the cost of living of the people will not go down for a while and a half.
In contrast, coal is nothing, and the real "fierce" place of the EU is that it even considers banning Russian oil and gradually getting rid of gas dependence, with the goal of completely saying goodbye to Russia in 2027.
First of all, oil, from the supply point of view, Africa has proven oil reserves of 125 billion barrels, supply to Europe is certainly no problem, but the global oil export contribution accounted for only 9%, to be honest very little.
First, according to the gap calculation, Africa wants to meet Europe's exports of at least 7.4 million barrels per day, but there is a problem involving OPEC quotas.
Africa has 7 OPEC members, but unlike Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and other countries that generally inhibit their own oil production capacity, African OPEC members generally cannot achieve the agreed output for various reasons, and the gap is large.
For example, Nigeria had a crude oil production quota of 1.68 million barrels per day in January 2022, but in fact, it produced less than 1.25 million barrels per day in the last months of 2021.
For example, Libya has a quota of 2 million bpd, but the actual production is less than 1.2 million bpd.
■ In addition, Angola's production has been unable to meet its own quota for four months.
Therefore, OPEC regularly publishes quota tables, and the amount of production in each country is fixed, and it is certainly not possible to be prolific.
In the case of Africa specifically, Angola and Nigeria, the two largest oil producers in Africa, have not been close to meeting OPEC quotas for a long time. Nigeria produces only 94% of the 1.7 million b/d quota. Similarly, Angola met only 78 per cent of the 1.4 million b/d quota.
To meet the needs of Europe, first meet the requirements, and then expand production, which requires OPEC to give you more, which is a bit difficult, because whoever increases the quota will relatively weaken the share of other countries.
The second problem is the problem of infrastructure, as a fat flow oil industry, oil in Africa is all the forces want to compete, so corruption, theft is a common thing.
In this context, the original infrastructure is not safe enough, and the new construction is prone to interruption, so it is not difficult to expand oil production in Africa.
Therefore, European oil will not be better off getting rid of Russia, the United States is too expensive to buy, the Middle East to buy, the Gulf will not sell you too much, after all, the big customers are in Asia.
The most difficult thing to do is natural gas, which is now built across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, with more than 4,000 kilometers of natural gas pipelines. It is not easy to say what year and month it can be used.
Therefore, more has to be liquefied natural gas, Algeria and Egypt are close, but the production capacity is limited, although Nigeria is not much, producing 12 billion cubic meters a year, these countries add up to replace the gap left by Russia 150 billion cubic meters The gap is not small.
So, recently Europe has been thinking about sub-Saharan Africa, and Mozambique is one of them, before Total and Exxon spent $20 billion on natural gas exports here, which can increase by 28.2 million tons a year, equivalent to a third of the gap, which is terrifying.
However, the first two years of war there, and then the European and American workers have run away, the project was interrupted, and recently Mozambique is interested in reopening.
As a result, African countries now have three intrinsic needs for natural gas: stable production, reliable finances, and fair trade.
Unlike the mainland, European and American countries run faster than anyone else when they encounter danger; second, in the past, European and American energy giants took the majority of equity, and these countries could only passively receive them; third, the EU's trade discrimination against Africa.
For the first point is different and explained, the second and third points can be said to be full of Western colonial thinking. Speaking of Mozambique's natural gas, the right to speak is in the hands of Japan (financiers) and France (investors).
When it comes to trade discrimination, it is more common, for example, africa's largest coffee exporter, the European Union only buys coffee beans, and it is tax-free, but it has to set up its own roasting plant to process and then export, and it requires huge tariffs.
For example, in 2014, Germany spent $1.5 billion on coffee beans, which were reprocessed and exported to earn $3 billion. Similarly, Africa is only allowed to export pure oil, into refineries (unless it is European), and the tax rate has soared.
Therefore, the EU sought cooperation with Africa, to be honest, did not make a good calculation, as in previous centuries, the initial European merchants colonized Africa, shipped raw materials to Europe, and had absolute control, which was the core thinking of colonialism.