Mass demonstrations against the extraction of shale gas have recently been held in Romania and Bulgaria. U.S. companies actively lobby the "shale revolution" in Eastern and Central Europe. All this happens against the background of anti-Russian slogans. "Shale fever" has already struck Lithuania, Ukraine, Moldova and Poland; the U.S. is rubbing its hands.

Energy independence on Russia is currently a fashion trend in Europe's political circles. Accusing Russia's gas giant Gazprom of inflated gas prices, many European leaders rely on their own exploitation of shale deposits. We can see the supposedly positive experience in shale gas production in the U.S., which cut gas prices in the world five times, eliminated gas imports and created many jobs. The West strongly promotes this experience in the West as panacea for "Gazprom's dictatorship." 

A study conducted by Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in 2011, predicted a 13-percent decline of Russia's share in the European natural gas market by 2040. "The geopolitical implications of the expansion of shale gas production in the United States will be enormous. With the arrival of liquefied natural gas to Europe - the product that was displaced from the U.S. market - the energy power of Russia, Venezuela and Iran began to weaken against the U.S. gas abundance," Amy Myers Jaffe, one of the authors of the study said two years ago. Numbers suggest that this is not the case, though. In 2009, the share of the Russian gas in Europe was 27 percent. Today, the figure has not changed much: it still remains on the level of 29-30 percent.

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