Russian gas shut off may smash Czech glass industry to smithereens

David Sobotka remembers visiting his father at the workshop at the age of five and watching him shape the molten glass beside the fierce heat of the kilns, here in the heartland of the Czech Republic’s traditional glassmaking industry.

He enrolled in the local school for glassmakers himself a few years later, becoming part of a craft with roots in the area going back to the 12th century now threatened if Russian president Vladimir Putin decides to cut shut down the pipeline that carries the gas used to melt the glass.

“If he does so, it’s the end of glass,” Sobotka says.

A landlocked country without a straightforward option to receive shipped liquid natural gas, the Czech Republic is connected by pipeline directly to Russia’s gas fields, and relies on the country for almost all of its supply of an energy source that drives industry and heats about one-third of homes.

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This previously cheap and convenient energy source long ago supplanted the wood fuel that once drew the Czech glassmakers to these forested hills, a transition dating back to the construction of the Transgas pipeline under the Soviet Union to then Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

Earlier this week, the flow of gas through the major Nord Stream 1 pipeline was cut.

This is nominally for maintenance, but there are widespread fears that the interruption is a prelude to Moscow stopping the flow entirely to pressurise the West to drop its support for Ukraine in repelling the Russian invasion.

At the Jiří Pačinek glass workshop in Kunratice u Cvikova, where Sobotka works producing glasses, vases, and ornaments, the gas keeps the kilns burning 24 hours a day.

If the kilns are allowed to cool, it takes a week to reheat them to the required temperature of 1,200 degrees and over, and each time they are restarted an inner plate must be replaced.

“The temperature needs to go up really, really slowly, so it doesn’t crack,” explains Jan Pačinek (21), a son of the owner who is following in his father’s footsteps as a master glassmaker, as he demonstrates how to shape the molten glass with tongs.

“If it cracks it needs to be rebuilt, and that takes two weeks. To lose two weeks of work is very painful.”

In this boutique workshop in the rural surrounds the so-called “Crystal Valley”, heels of bread are spread out on top of one kiln, drying out so one of the workers can take them home to use as animal feed.

It now finds itself on the frontline of geopolitics. A cut to Russian gas supplies outright would cause prices to spike further, imperil the heating of millions of homes in Europe, and shut down the production of swathes of businesses like this that rely on it for their manufacturing.

The glass workers have examined options for alternative fuels as their gas prices have risen between six and eight times in the six months since Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s borders.

There isn’t a simple alternative. Propane gas can be used, but it must be transported by truck, making it more expensive, perhaps requiring another hike to the company’s prices, which have already been raised by 30 per cent this year.

Electric kilns could be possible, though the high price of electricity these days is a worry, as is the investment required to change all of the workshop’s existing equipment, which Sobotka fears would put the business in an even more precarious situation.

“That would be an even bigger economic suicide,” he says of going electric. “The last option would be to go like the Middle Ages, and to start burning the wood.”

This region is long known for producing innovation, from the sparkling clear crystal that once was part of the chandeliers of the Habsburg monarchy to the machine-cut technology that led to Swarovski crystal.

Czech artisans brought these techniques around the world, including to Ireland, where it was glassmaker Charles Bacik – grandfather to Labour TD Ivana – who founded Waterford Crystal.

This ability to innovate may be called on once again.

Many livelihoods are at stake. Sobotka’s 17-year-old daughter is studying at the same glassmaking school he attended, in the nearby village of Kamenicky Senov.

“My mother is glass painter, my father is glassblower… My wife is a glassmaker. My son studied glass engraving,” Sobotka says.

“We survived two years of Covid,” he adds. A cut to the gas “will be the end of us”.