Hormuz and the Limits of Italian Energy Diversification

The Russian-Ukraine war in 2022 exposed how structurally vulnerable the resilience of Italy’s energy security apparatus was to external shocks. Near total dependence on Russian gas forced compelled Rome to rethink its strategic autonomy, a process the European Union only made legally binding nearly four years later, through the agreement banning all imports of Russian gas by autumn 2027. Yet four years after the conflict began, that lesson appears only partially learned. Italy has not reduced its dependence on imports; it had simply relocated it.

This relocation took the form of supplier diversification, which ended up multiplying the number of bilateral relationships to manage, with Algiers, Baku, Doha and, increasingly, Washington. However, the key structural variable that generated that initial vulnerability in the first place, remains unchanged.  In short, there remains a significant gap between the rhetoric of energy security achieved, and its actual substance.

The strategy launched after 2022 allowed Italy to replace rigid Siberian pipelines with the more flexible cargoes of liquefied natural gas (LNG), achieving the goal of cutting national supply loose from Moscow. That shift, however, produced a serious side effect. It moved the axis of vulnerability from land infrastructure to maritime routes, from a bilateral risk tied to a single state actor to a systemic risk tied to the resilience of a small number of maritime chokepoints.

Among these chokepoints, the most relevant for Italy is the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has used since the start of the 2026 conflict as a tool of geopolitical pressure, and through which roughly a quarter of seaborne oil and a fifth of the world’s LNG trade normally pass. Complicating matters further has been not just the closure of the strait, but a series of direct attacks on oil and gas infrastructure across the Gulf. The clearest case for Italy is the Edison-QatarEnergy contract for the Adriatic LNG terminal. Between March and July 2026, QatarEnergy repeatedly invoked force majeure, blocking a total of 24 LNG cargoes bound for the country, worth an estimated 3 billion cubic meters of gas.

Even so, the physical supply disruption feared in the early phase of the crisis never materialized. The crisis showed up mainly as a spike in inflation, with prices rising by 2% in just three months, between February and May 2026, equivalent to an extra 505 euros a year for an average family, according to calculations by Italy’s National Consumers Union based on data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics data. In addition to concerns over supply chain reliability, a particularly hot summer pushed up energy consumption for cooling homes and offices, cutting into the volumes of gas available for injection into storage just as Europe was meant to be building up its reserves for winter.

In this context Italy finds itself relatively well placed. From one perspective, Italy can count on thirteen storage sites across the country with a combined capacity of over 18 billion cubic meters of natural gas, enough to cover more than a third of national consumption during the winter heating season. Its existing infrastructure has proven resilient enough to quickly replace Qatari gas with LNG that is mostly American, tying the country ever more closely to Washington from the very start of the conflict, and reproducing a pattern already seen before, swapping one supplier for another without ever really addressing the underlying dependence on foreign imports.

The replacement supplier, moreover, is no ordinary partner. The United States could use its own LNG exports as a bargaining tool to shape Rome’s political and economic choices. And the wave of price rises has not stopped at gas either. On the commodity exchanges in Turin and Rome, urea prices have risen sharply, with direct knock-on effects for the costs of Italian agriculture. These ripple effects show that dependence on foreign energy is never just a matter of price. It shapes trade balances, diplomatic leverage, and the cost of living all at once.

This growing reliance on LNG carried by sea, rather than gas delivered by pipeline, has placed Italy’s maritime position at the centre of its energy security. All of this is rooted in a deeper factor, Italy’s geographic location, which it still struggles to turn into strategic advantage. Positioned in the Mediterranean basin and cut off to the north by an Alpine barrier that limits land links with the rest of the continent, Italy relies heavily on its port system to connect with global trade flows. With roughly eight thousand kilometers of coastline, the country nonetheless has never built the kind of maritime projection needed to play an active role in crises affecting the very routes it depends on, the same routes that, as we have seen, now underpin the stability of its energy and agricultural sectors.

The limits of the Italian model become clearer when compared with countries that have built resilience not only through supplier diversification, but also through route diversification. The contrast with Jordan is instructive here. Where Italy relied on its ability to pay a premium for alternative cargoes, Jordan achieved the same result by logistical decoupling. Its oil and LPG imports travel via Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Yanbu to Aqaba, bypassing Hormuz altogether, and a floating LNG terminal brought online there in 2025 gave the Kingdom a second line of defense the moment the strait closed.

Italy has no comparable alternative on this scale, which is part of why its response so far has leaned more on diplomacy than on infrastructure. It is against this backdrop of structural factors that signals of a reorientation of maritime posture should be read. Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has said Italy would be willing, once the conflict ends, to join an international coalition of a defensive nature to restore freedom of navigation through the strait, a position echoed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the close of the last G7 summit. It remains, though, a commitment conditional on the ending of a global energy crisis whose outcome is still nowhere in sight, and one that does not resolve the deeper structural problem of Italy’s physical dependence on routes beyond its own control.

What has unfolded since the conflict began points to a broader issue. Diversifying external suppliers is not the same thing as energy security, and cannot substitute for it. Italy needs to turn its attention inward as well, investing in renewables with the same urgency it has shown in chasing new foreign suppliers. Continuing to shift dependence from one point on the map to another, without ever reducing its overall scale, only sets the stage for the same crisis to repeat itself, in a different form, the next time a strait close.