What natural gas has to do with conflict in Ukraine | Marketplace.org: "But Russia isn't the only country with natural gas. Why can't Europe just get natural gas from someone else? Like the U.S., for example?
Because, unlike oil, shipping natural gas is expensive and extremely labor intensive. It has to be liquified.
"The reason that natural gas is primarily a continental market is because it’s pretty cheap to move it through pipelines, but it’s very expensive to liquefy it and ship it by tanker," explains James Bushnell, an economist at The University of California, Davis.
Russia's natural gas pipeline to Europe goes through Ukraine."