In the wake of the worst energy crisis it battled in more than three decades, the European Union is trying to find ways to improve its energy security -- and new pipelines and LNG are the key words.

The recent gas row between Russia and Ukraine, which halted gas supplies to Europe during a bitter cold spell in January, is the "worst energy crisis Europe has experienced … since the oil crisis in 1973," said Frank Umbach, an energy expert at the Center for European Security Strategies, a German security consultancy. Umbach spoke earlier this week in Berlin.

The row is still somewhat in the air, with experts unsure who is really to blame for the gas shortages -- Ukraine or Russia. The EU has dispatched observers who have returned from the conflict zone without issuing grades of responsibility.

"The message from Brussels is, 'We don't want to judge on who is to blame but rather look forward'" to better relations with Ukraine, but especially Russia, Umbach said.

It's obvious that Europe will have to improve interlinkages in its gas-grid infrastructure to be able to quickly react in future times of crisis, yet this won't solve many other problems Europe is battling.

Russia is Europe's largest single energy provider, with a quarter of Europe's natural gas pumped out of Siberian gas fields -- and 80 percent arriving via Ukrainian transit pipelines. As Europe's domestic resources decrease, Western observers have warned of an even greater dependency from Russia.

This has irritated the United States, which in past years has actively lobbied for more energy-import diversification in Europe, often irking Russia. The Obama administration has promised to improve relations with Russia, "but this does not mean that … we will diminish our resistance to Russian efforts to dominate energy routes to Europe, especially from the Caspian Sea region and Iraq," Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Matt Bryza said in comments released by the U.S. State Department.

Washington and some energy experts have criticized Nord Stream, a pipeline to be built by two German firms, a Dutch company and Russia's Gazprom. They say it is too expensive and will hurt Europe's energy security -- although the companies involved say the opposite is true.

Nord Stream would link western Siberia's gas fields directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea; the pipeline's costs have risen from $6.4 billion to some $9.5 billion. It would offer Europe 1.94 trillion cubic feet of gas per year, and its estimated completion was pushed back by at least one year to 2011-2012.

Rather, Bryza said, "We need to help our European allies obtain new … natural gas from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and Iraq through major pipeline projects like Nabucco or the Turkey-Greece-Italy pipeline."

The Nabucco project would feed up to 1.1 trillion cubic feet of gas annually to Europe beginning in 2014, according to the project consortium of Austrian, German, Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian companies. However, its goal of shepherding Central Asian and Middle Eastern gas hasn't gotten the needed guarantees from suppliers or a final financial OK from transit countries such as all-important Turkey.

Yet there are other ways to diversify gas imports. One alternative is making Europe fit to handle increasing loads of liquefied natural gas from non-European sources -- for example, Algeria, Egypt and Qatar.

European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs recently lauded Qatar's potential as a key energy-import country for Europe.

"Few people know that Qatar holds the third-largest gas reserves in the world and will soon be our fourth gas supplier, just after Russia, Norway and Algeria," he wrote on his Web site.

In Europe, Britain has a leading role when it comes to LNG; it already has a terminal in place. On Friday the LNG tanker Tembek from Qatar was expected to dock at the brand-new South Hook terminal in a Wales port, the largest LNG plant in Europe and a joint venture between Qatar Petroleum, Exxon Mobil and Total. The gas from the Tembek will then be fed into a pipeline running nearly 200 miles across Wales into England.

All over Europe, similar projects are in the pipeline; experts say that up to 14 LNG terminals could be built by 2010. An E.ON daughter company recently opened an office in Doha to push its LNG business, and Italy is planning to construct what could be the world's largest offshore LNG terminal.

However, the financial crisis is placing doubts on some of these projects. Experts have warned of an LNG production crunch by 2015. Because of rising construction costs and delays in planned projects, the industry might not be able to meet the quickly growing demand for LNG, they say.