That's 5% of Europe's yearly consumption.

Fossil fuel reserves are not a fixed number. When prices rise, energy companies expand exploration and find more. Many areas are still basically unexplored for deep minerals. There are undrilled shale basins across western Europe, and the Black Sea and Ionian Sea have barely been tapped. Technical innovations like fracking and horizontal drilling also expand the reserves that can be economically extracted.

There may be valid political and environmental reasons not to go this route but it's silly to claim that fossil fuel reserves are so limited when no one has really looked.

	▲	panstromek 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		From what I've read so far it seems people have really looked and we have some estimates (not yet proven reserves). The highest estimates I found are around 10-20 years of current consumption rate. That doesn't seem like a lot, and Europe's consumption is going down so it doesn't feel like this will change much for shale oil. But Norway still has big gas reserves and supplies 33% of Eueropian consumption, so I was actually wrong in the original comment and the US LNG impact is pretty overstated, it's just 15%. Most of the rest comes from middle east.