Hybrid Threats to the European Union’s Energy Sector: An Overview

The energy sector of the European Union is one of its key vulnerabilities, given the strong reliance of the EU on non-members’ supplies as well as the high dependence of the European society on energy for almost all its activities. This makes the energy sector an interesting target for hybrid threat actors willing to advance their strategic agendas. This paper presents a reach back extension of how to think about hybrid threats to the European Union’s energy sector, taking as a starting point a sector-based approach and following a comprehensive multi-domain approach for its deeper understanding. To do so, the Hybrid Threats conceptual model proposed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) is taken as a reference for the review. Firstly, the energy sector is located and described within the Hybrid Threats conceptual model; secondly, different actors and their interests in the EU’s energy sector are explained to illustrate the role that energy vectors can play in international relations; thirdly, tools used to target the energy sector are described and exemplified to show how activities of diverse nature can be used to influence the energy sector; finally, the intra- and inter-domain dependencies of the Infrastructure domain, to which the energy sector belongs, are reviewed to account for the complexity of its connections and consider potential indirect impacts that may affect the energy sector, as well as those it can create.