Forty-four days, twenty-two billion euros. Not a single additional molecule of energy.
That is how Ursula von der Leyen framed Europe’s Iran war tab when she addressed the European Parliament this week, and the arithmetic is brutal in its simplicity. Since the conflict began on February 28, the EU’s fossil fuel import bill has increased by over 22 billion euros, not because Europe is consuming more energy, but because the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade normally flows, has been functionally closed. The International Energy Agency has described the resulting disruption as the largest supply shock in the history of the global oil market. The IEA’s Executive Director went further, calling it “the greatest threat to global energy security in history.”
Europe did not start this war. Europe is paying for it anyway.
The Bill Arrived Before the War Ended
The impact is not abstract and it is not arriving in the future. It is already on supermarket shelves, at petrol stations, and on household energy bills across the continent. Crude and oil product flows through the Strait of Hormuz plunged from around 20 million barrels per day before the war to just over 2 million barrels per day in March, while LNG supplies from Qatar and the UAE dropped by over 300 million cubic metres per day since March 1, translating into a loss of over 2 billion cubic metres of gas supply every week.
“Since the beginning of the conflict, our bill for fossil fuel imports has increased by over 22 billion euros. 44 days, 22 billion euros — not a single molecule of energy in addition. This is the second fossil fuel crisis in just a few years. There is one thing that all these events are making clear: we are paying a very high price for our overdependency on fossil fuels.”
— Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission
Almost all EU member states will face difficulties meeting the requirement that gas storage be 90% full by November 1, with current storage averages sitting around 30% following a harsh winter and high gas prices causing delays in replenishment decisions. The Commission is already considering lowering the 2026 target from 90% to 80%, which is less a policy choice than an acknowledgment of how tight the situation has become.
The disruption has created panic buying and severe shortages in the distribution of petroleum products, LNG, and urea used for fertiliser across multiple continents. The Food Policy Institute has warned of long-term increases in food prices due to the disruption in fuel and fertiliser markets, since over 30% of global urea is exported from Gulf countries through the Strait. The war in the Middle East is pricing itself into European grocery bills through supply chains most citizens did not know existed until they stopped working.
Coordinate, Protect, Reduce: The Commission’s Emergency Playbook
The European Parliament’s plenary session this week brought together MEPs and Commission representatives to debate both the energy crisis and the situation in Lebanon, where hundreds of civilians have been killed and over a million displaced following Israeli military operations. On Lebanon, MEPs pressed for a sustainable ceasefire and increased humanitarian access, with von der Leyen confirming the EU is mobilising ReliefEU emergency stocks for immediate aid to the Lebanese people.
On energy, the Commission presented a package of immediate measures that will go to EU leaders at the informal European Council summit in Cyprus on April 23 and 24, published under the name AccelerateEU.
- The first pillar is coordination. The European Commission is calling on EU countries to make timely and coordinated preparations to secure oil and refined petroleum products, noting that commercial stocks are decreasing given the prolonged closure of the Strait and that the EU should be preparing for possible consequences if the situation continues beyond the end of May. Von der Leyen pointed to the EU Energy Platform built during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine energy crisis, which aggregated 90 billion cubic metres of gas purchases and matched 77 billion cubic metres between buyers and suppliers, as the model for what coordinated action can deliver. The Commission is now working on EU-wide coordination of gas storage filling, to prevent member states from competing against each other in the same market simultaneously and driving prices higher for everyone.
- The second pillar is protection. The Commission is moving quickly on more flexible state aid rules, with a temporary framework aimed at giving member states more room to support vulnerable households and exposed industrial sectors without breaching single market rules. Von der Leyen’s stated goal is to have the new temporary framework adopted before the end of April, which would be unusually fast by EU legislative standards and reflects genuine urgency at the top of the Commission.
- The third pillar is demand reduction. The Commission is looking at energy efficiency measures: building renovation, industrial equipment renewal, and electrification incentives as tools to reduce consumption without rationing. As von der Leyen put it, the cheapest energy is the energy Europe does not use.
The 22 Billion Euro Case for the Energy Transition
Von der Leyen’s statement contained a passage that would have been politically awkward in a different context but landed as almost self-evident given everything that has happened since February 28. Since the beginning of this conflict, she told MEPs, Europe has been reminded of the price it pays for overdependency on fossil fuels. The Strait of Hormuz is closed and citizens feel it immediately at the petrol station and on the household bill. That is not a distant crisis. It is a direct and immediate consequence of a strategic choice Europe made over decades.
Renewables and nuclear now account for over 70% of EU electricity generation, but the problem is that electricity and oil are not the same thing. Europe’s transport sector, heating systems, and much of its industrial base still depend on fossil fuels that transit through chokepoints Europe does not control and cannot protect. Every euro spent on emergency measures to manage the current crisis is, in von der Leyen’s framing, an argument for accelerating the energy transition rather than a reason to slow it down.
The Commission is pushing the Grids package, designed to accelerate grid connections and enable better integration of clean energy, to be approved by early summer rather than end of year. An electrification strategy will be presented before the summer as well, including a new target on electrification — what von der Leyen called “only what gets measured gets done.” An investment conference will be convened to mobilise private capital into grids, storage, and batteries.
From Cyprus, a Coalition and a Warning
At the Cyprus summit, European Council President António Costa confirmed that a coalition of more than 50 countries is preparing a defensive mission to restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, once the necessary security conditions are met. Von der Leyen also proposed expanding the scope of Operation Aspides, the EU’s existing naval mission in the Red Sea, from protection to a more sophisticated joint maritime coordination role, and suggested setting up structural cooperation with regional partners to scale up defence production against the shared threat of mass drone and missile proliferation.
EU leaders held a working lunch with partners from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Gulf Cooperation Council, and announced an upcoming EU-GCC summit in 2026. Costa said the EU is not part of the conflict but will be part of the solution, and welcomed both the US-Iran ceasefire and the Israel-Lebanon cessation of hostilities, while urging all parties to engage in good faith toward a permanent peace.
The fragility of that peace is not lost on anyone in Brussels. Von der Leyen said explicitly that continued Israeli strikes on Lebanon threaten to derail the entire process, and that security is indivisible: you cannot have stability in the Middle East while Lebanon is in flames. The EU’s position is that the ceasefire must hold, the nuclear and missile concerns must be addressed in any permanent agreement, and the Strait must be reopened on terms consistent with international law, not with Iran charging tolls as a condition of passage.
Our Take: 44 Days That Changed the Energy Debate
The 22 billion euro bill is a political number as much as an economic one. Von der Leyen used it in the European Parliament to make an argument that European energy policy has been making in softer language for years: fossil fuel dependency is not just an environmental problem, it is a security liability, and the Middle East has just provided the most expensive possible demonstration of that fact.
The Commission’s immediate measures are sensible and largely familiar; coordination, targeted support, demand reduction, because they draw on the lessons of 2022 when Europe managed a comparable gas shock following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The EU has institutional muscle memory for this kind of crisis management and it is deploying it.
What is different this time is the scale of the acceleration being demanded on the structural side. The Grids package being pushed to early summer, the electrification strategy arriving before summer, the investment conference being convened — these are not crisis measures. They are the energy transition being used as a crisis response, which is exactly what the Commission has been arguing should happen and exactly what the events of the past 44 days have made considerably easier to justify politically.
The Commission’s own assessment is that the EU should start preparing for possible consequences if the Strait disruption continues beyond the end of May. That is a sober judgment from an institution that does not use cautionary language casually. The ceasefire is fragile, the Islamabad talks have stalled on the nuclear issue, and the timeline for full restoration of Hormuz navigation remains genuinely uncertain. Europe is managing a crisis it did not create, paying a bill it did not run up, and using the pain to justify changes it has been trying to make for a decade. Whether the political will survive the end of the immediate emergency is the question the next six months will answer.
