A month after Russia cut off gas supplies to the Ukraine for the first time in 2006, Angela Merkel said that the European Union which gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia needed to develop a common energy policy over the next 15 years to guarantee supply security.
At the same time, Russian energy monopoly Gazprom, along with its German partners E.On and BASF-Wintershall, were deciding on "Nord Stream" as the name for a pipeline that would make Germany heavily dependent on Russia for energy for decades to come.
The European Union, meanwhile, is largely absent from this debate. Talk of a common energy market died soon after Ms. Merkel made her 2006 statement, but in Berlin, there has been little support for Merkel's concerns about overreliance on Russia.The nations continue to make deals that make them reliant on Russia for the long term. This tension between the recognized need for a common market and nations acting in their own long-term energy security interests is at the core of a growing European rift over how to deal with Russia.
Energy source however playing very significance role for each country and what Merkel concern over her country overreliance on Rusia its one of her visionary step for her country. We have all saw what happened to the world when ones of the important energy source such as the oil price increase. Higher oil prices since 1999 partly the result of OPEC supply management policies contributed to the global economic downturn in 2000-2001. Accordind to the report by The International Energy Agency on May 2004 the vulnerability of oil-importing countries to higher oil prices varies markedly depending on the degree to which they are net importers and the oil intensity of their economies. Eventough Germany has successfully become one of the strongest economy in the world but the fact that Germany is one of the largest importers of Russian gas will easily put a country in unstability once if Russian gas import isn`t available any longer.
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