Concept
Blood money, yes, but how much ? With this provocative research question, bloodinourgas.eu was conceived in April-May 2022 , right after the full invasion of Ukraine by Russia, to visualize the money transferred to the latter by the EU member states for the gas imports.
At the time, and in a smaller scale nowadays, there was a incoherence between the near-universal condamnation of the invasion by the EU nations, and the continuation of the gas purchases from Russia — which directly funds the state — and thus their ability to wage war.
Arguments abounded both in favour of cutting the imports, as well as for keeping this cheap natural gas flowing. The EU’s (and member states’) policies were muddled, with information on actual import lowering and its impact on the Russian state’s funding not readily accessible to the general public.
Built on that realization, bloodinourgas.eu takes as reference the real-time natural gas flows measured on the European gas pipeline system’s point of entries, applies the daily spot market rate to it, and estimates how much the EU nations’ gas consumption was funding the invasion.
Methodology
Gas transmitters in the EU and in associated countries frequently report the volume transiting through their pipelines to ENTSOG (the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas)‘s transparency platform.
Pricing the exact revenue of the imported gas is near-impossible: contracts are confidential and vary wildly in pricing, duration and conditions. However, numerous research organisations use the Amsterdam’s commodity market (“TTF”) spot price as a good estimate. This price point is updated daily from the trades executed that day.
To build an estimate of the blood money being sent to Putin’s war machine, those two previous data points are multiplied, and an extrapolation of the last few points is calculated in order to power a counter.
Technology
- typescript/html/scss
- go
- postgresql