Europe Has Plenty of Oil, It Just Doesn’t Want to Use It

The headline from the Associated Press – “Europe has ‘maybe 6 weeks of jet fuel left,’ energy agency head warns” — sounds pretty darn ominous.

Europe has “maybe six weeks or so” of remaining jet fuel supplies, the head of the International Energy Agency said Thursday in a wide-ranging interview, warning of possible flight cancellations “soon” if oil supplies remain blocked by the Iran war.

Dutch airline KLM and U.K.-based budget carrier easyJet said Thursday that they were not experiencing current fuel shortages, without commenting further on the IEA’s warning. Meanwhile, U.S. carrier Delta Air Lines — which frequently flies to destinations across Europe — said it was aware of the continent’s “potential jet fuel supply issue” and monitoring the situation, although it didn’t expect immediate impacts. Still, all three airlines are among those that have already seen higher costs eat into their budgets.

From this, you might think that the Europeans were cursed with severely limited sources of oil underneath their feet or within their territories and were cursed to be dependent upon foreign sources for the remaining era of the internal-combustion engine. But that’s not the case at all.

Seemingly once or twice a year, somewhere in Europe, someone finds another sizable deposit of oil. The problem is that the political and legal structures of European governments put an enormous priority on reducing carbon emissions and protecting the environment, and much lower priority on producing and refining their own oil to be less dependent upon foreign sources of oil. But there are some small changes occurring.

• Earlier this month, the Scottish National Party announced its support for Rosebank and Jackdaw, “two of the U.K.’s largest and most controversial proposed oil and gas fields.” Located around 80 miles northwest of Shetland, Rosebank is [one of] the biggest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea, and could extract a projected 500 million barrels of oil equivalent over its lifetime.
• About 19 miles southwest of the Rosebank field is the Cambo field, containing at least 600 million barrels of oil in place.” Tied up in red tape and a glacial approval process, his project continues to inch towards actual development.
• Last July, a Canadian firm exploring potential sites off Poland’s northern Baltic coast claimed to have made the largest oil discovery in Poland’s history. Central European Petroleum  “announced that it has found a deposit containing 22 million tons of oil (roughly 161 million barrels)  and 5 billion cubic meters of gas at the Wolin East 1 well, which is located around six kilometers from the port city of Świnoujście in northwest Poland.”
• Last August, Aker BP discovered a new field in the Norwegian North Sea that “adds substantial new resources to the Yggdrasil area. The recoverable volume is estimated at 96–134 million barrels of oil equivalent.”
• In Ireland, the Barryroe Oil Field off County Cork “is estimated to hold about 1.6 billion barrels of oil, of which about 311 million barrels are recoverable using current technologies… at its lowest estimate, the Barryroe Oil field could deliver, by itself, at least six years of supply to Ireland… the Barryroe field, like almost all of Ireland’s untapped oil and gas reserves, cannot be accessed by law in accordance with this country’s climate action plan, and legislation enacted by the Green Party on its return to power in 2020 which effectively bans all new oil and gas exploration in Irish waters.”

We should note that red tape, opposition from environmentalists, and government bureaucracy aren’t the only obstacles to drilling in these places. Some of them are in deep water, in cold, distant locations, and for the expense of building the drilling platforms to be worthwhile, oil prices must be at a certain level.

But the bottom line is that Europe has plenty of oil – and I don’t just mean olive oil. Most European governments made the deliberate choice to stop getting it out of the ground at the pace their economies needed, leaving them more dependent upon importing it from other places. For a long while, Europe imported a lot of oil from Russia, although that has declined dramatically from before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. In the first quarter of 2021, Russia sent almost 29 percent of its oil exports to European Union countries; that’s down to about one percent in the fourth quarter of 2025.

This is all focusing on oil; Cyprus, Romania, Norway, and Greece all have untapped natural gas reserves as well. Without going into the details of an off-the-record conversation with the Romanian embassy in the U.S., I can say that the Romanian government is extremely interested in becoming a major energy exporter in the years to come. Neptun Deep, located off the Romanian coast in the Black sea, aims to begin production in 2027. “With estimated recoverable volumes of approximately 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas, Neptun Deep will position Romania as the largest gas producer in the European Union.”

If Europe is facing a worsening energy crisis, it is largely self-inflicted, the inevitable consequence of a steadfast refusal to develop the fossil fuels that are within their territories. Hopefully, Americans are paying attention to their dilemma and attempts to play catch-up on energy production.