Matthew Dalton

Well, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe decided to cut back dramatically on buying Russian gas via pipelines that connect Russia to the European Union.

And they largely replaced that gas with liquefied natural gas from the United States and a few other places.

This is gas that is put into pressurized vessels that can cool it into a liquid and transfer it across the ocean.

And so the Iran war has knocked off all of Qatar's LNG production, which is about 20% of all global supply.

Most of U.S.

LNG exports go to Europe in normal times.

However, without Qatari LNG, Asian economies started bidding for those cargoes.

And so there were cargoes that were bound for different places in Europe and suddenly turned around and headed to Asia.

So now the entire continent has a problem because they must now pay a lot more for LNG than they were doing before the war.

Well, Italy is looking to its biggest supplier of gas, which is Algeria, just across the Mediterranean.

It is North Africa's biggest gas producer.

And there is the possibility for some more supply to go through the pipeline to Italy, but it's not a huge amount.

It's definitely not going to offset what Europe was getting or what the global economy was getting from Qatar.

So Algeria can only do so much, and it does have two major economies that are partially depending on it.

You know, one thing, though, that separates Spain from Italy, interestingly, is that Spain has done a lot to build out renewables and so relies less on gas.

And Italy has been quite slow to do so.

And so they're much more dependent on gas than most other economies in Europe.

So Italy is really feeling the pinch in particular.

But the gas is out there.

The U.S.