Demand doubts cloud grand plans for gas

So much uncertainty hangs over the shape of Europe’s future energy sources that grand plans to transform the Mediterranean into a grid of gas pipelines with Italy as the hub risk languishing on the drawing board.

“After this financial crisis we are a bit in the fog,” admits Umberto Quadrino, the chief executive of Edison, a Milan-based utility and Europe’s oldest energy company.

ust two years ago, there was an air of panic over how Europe would cope with a huge deficit in gas forecast over the next decade. Demand was rising, domestic production was falling, old nuclear power plants were to be phased out and coal-fired power stations were seen as a threat to European Union targets to cut emissions.