81–90 of 278 posts
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And the UK has relatively more secure sources in Norway and the North Sea.
Not sure I would bet on the pipeline from Norway remaining secure. They have increased their level of military alert for a reason.
One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europe. With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines, and with countries like Qatar refusing to alter long-term energy contracts to increase supplies to Europe, and with Iran still under the Trump-era sanctions (which Biden continued), that mostly leaves the US…
> One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europe. No, it wasn't. America wasn't pushing to sell to Europe, and Europe was becoming more and more reliant on Russian and Asian gas. The shift to American gas (and every other country they can get it from) happened after Russia invaded Ukraine and then shut o…
Everything since then has been one pipeline war after another, from the perspective of energy deals at least. Georgia 2008, for example, was "not a pipeline war!" according to the Guardian (meaning a lot of people were saying it was, and they were pushing back). Note how the 2006 BTC pipeline route (Baku-Azerbaijan-Turkey) was chosen to bypass Russia?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia...
After that, there were the two competing pipeline deals in Syria, c. 2009-2010. One was a Russia-Iran deal, one was a Qatar-Saudi-USA deal. In 2010, Assad took the Russia-Iran offer, and in 2011, Obama's government OKed a CIA destabilization-and-regime change program in Syria. If Syria had taken the other offer, I doubt that would have happened. This Ukraine war is just more of the same (plus, a new Cold War is good for military procurement budgets).
Of course, energy geopolitics isn't the only issue, but anyone who has read Steve Coll's "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power", or Daniel Yergin's "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" will recognize it's often the central reason for international conflicts.
As far as the clearly reprehensible human rights record of Putin being the reason for the conflict, that's laughable - just look at Mohammed bin "Bone Saw" Salman in Saudi Arabia, or the Yemen war. Now if MBS pulled out of Wall Street and ended the Saudi roll in petrodollar recycling, then we'd be hearing about the need for regime change. And if Putin and Assad had signed up for the petrodollar program, they'd be lauded as democratic reformers, and the Ukraine invasion would portrayed in the US media as a necessary action to dismantle neo-Nazi militias (see Yemen, again).
On some Gas thread, someone posted a link where you could see full %, ingress and egress graphs of gas storages over time across europe. I can't find it. Could someone post it please? Thanks in advance.
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Although the UK has an appreciable percentage of Europe's LNG re-gasification capacity, while Germany has none, and imports LNG via Belgium and the Netherlands instead. The UK has storage, it's just sitting in ships off the coast.
Unlike oil, LNG boils off while sitting off the coast, so this is not a long term strategy.
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I'll admit it has passed my mind several times. I never said it out loud (until now), but the coincidence that the very year EU loses its main gas supply we get sunny winter without snow at all... I know it's probably a coincidence, but my mind doesn't like coincidences. There's always this "what if" voice inside my head.
It's actually the opposite, you have a pattern-seeking brain that likes coincidences. It's why we notice patterns, because some are not coincidences but outright consequences, however indirect they may be! But there's a lot of coincidences in the world, some being so unlikely and so unfortunate, our mind can refuse to accept that, well.. it can be just a coincidence. The longest-reigning UK monarch dies at the start…
Gas prices plummeting, energy bills soaring. The market will regulate itself. /s
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It's actually the opposite, you have a pattern-seeking brain that likes coincidences. It's why we notice patterns, because some are not coincidences but outright consequences, however indirect they may be! But there's a lot of coincidences in the world, some being so unlikely and so unfortunate, our mind can refuse to accept that, well.. it can be just a coincidence. The longest-reigning UK monarch dies at the start…
From a deeply cynical perspective, everything in the world is a coincidence, it's just that some coincidences happen so often that betting on them becomes useful, so we give them a name: "cause-effect relationship".
Looking at this chart [1] they're still 6 or 7 times more expensive compared to two years ago and further back, i.e. ~15 EUR/Mwh compared to the present ~100 EUR/Mwh. No energy-intensive industry can sustain a 6 or 7 times price increase of its core input. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas
That's going to shut down a lot of aluminium in countries that use petrochemicals to process it. Iceland is going to see its industry boom, as they use geothermal to process aluminium. I'd once heard the argument that Iceland exports energy in the form of aluminium billets. That's becoming more and more apparent now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although the UK has an appreciable percentage of Europe's LNG re-gasification capacity, while Germany has none, and imports LNG via Belgium and the Netherlands instead. The UK has storage, it's just sitting in ships off the coast.
Unlike oil, LNG boils off while sitting off the coast, so this is not a long term strategy.