According to Sapo, the European Union's dependence on fossil fuels was 70.9 percent in 2022, slightly above the 2021 level of 69.9 percent, stated Eurostat.

"The year 2022 was exceptional from an energy perspective. It was the first year after the major restrictions resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic were lifted, and it was also marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine," writes the European statistics office in the note released on 30 January.

That year, in addition to spikes in the prices of various energy sources, there was a drop in nuclear energy production, and even the increase in renewable sources was not enough to compensate for this.


According to the note released by the European statistics office, "this percentage has fallen significantly in recent decades", with a drop of 11.5 percentage points since 1990, the first year in which this data was collected.

The drop in dependence on fossil fuels is mainly due, according to the same source, to the increase in renewable energy. Dependence is calculated through the ratio of fossil fuels present in the region's energy demand.

Looking country by country, the biggest increases in dependency were seen in Estonia (3.2 percent), France (2.9 percent) and Bulgaria (2.8 percent).

In 2022, Malta remained the European country with the highest dependence on fossil fuels within the European area (96.1 percent), followed by Cyprus (86.3 percent) and the Netherlands (87.6 percent).


Most of the other EU countries have percentages between 50 and 85 percent. Portugal falls within this range, with a dependency of just under 70 percent. Only Sweden and Finland are below this range, with dependencies of around 30 percent and 38 percent respectively.