  As the COVID-19 virus spread over the world, governments restricted mobility
to slow transmission. Public health measures had different intensities across
European countries but all had significant impact on peoples daily lives and
economic activities, causing a drop of CO2 emissions of about 10% for the whole
year 2020. Here, we analyze changes in natural gas use in the industry and
built environment sectors during the first half of year 2020 with daily gas
flows data from pipeline and storage facilities in Europe. We find that
reductions of industrial gas use reflect decreases in industrial production
across most countries. Surprisingly, natural gas use in buildings also
decreased despite most people being confined at home and cold spells in March
2020. Those reductions that we attribute to the impacts of COVID-19 remain of
comparable magnitude to previous variations induced by cold or warm climate
anomalies in the cold season. We conclude that climate variations played a
larger role than COVID-19 induced stay-home orders in natural gas consumption
across Europe.
