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Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

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Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#101

Post by pavlov »

aa-jv wrote: post #74
pavlov wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling more gas to Europe isn’t a massive windfall to USA. The Biden administration has bigger fish to fry and wouldn’t risk such an intervention in Swedish waters just as Sweden is joining NATO. My money is on Russian hardliner factions operating rogue without Putin’s approval. He can’t admit he doesn’t know who did it. The Russian state security apparatus is so large, we have no idea what kind of internal tensions…

>The Biden administration has bigger fish to fry and wouldn’t risk such an intervention in Swedish waters just as Sweden is joining NATO. This is a pretty naive perspective - Since when has Sweden ever stood up to the crimes and misdeeds of the USA? Sweden ranks up there with Australia in the "lackey-state underdog to the USA" rankings ..

It's just not worth the Americans' time to be plotting such a thing now. Selling more natural gas is irrelevant to the Biden administration's survival. And there were general elections in both Sweden and Denmark within the past two months — terrible timing for such an offensive CIA operation in NATO waters because any information leak would have handed a potent electoral weapon to anti-American opposition parties.

The Russians are already a very active presence in the Baltic Sea, and this attack fits with their general pattern of confusion and misdirection.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#102

Post by ed_balls »

ed_balls wrote: post #78
photochemsyn wrote: post #50

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…

"With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines" They are not destroyed. There are 4 pipes in total and 1 pipe of NS2 is intact. Most likely Russia destroyed the other pipes to get NS2 working (you want gas? Need to certify NS2 and we won't pay contract penalties, because this is not our fault) Resources blackmail didn't work, hence nuclear threats and mobilisation.

Source for the downvoters https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/single-line-nord-str...

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#103

Post by ericmay »

photochemsyn wrote: post #92
marcinzm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US (in 2021) used 827 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year and produced 934. The amount it's expected to send to Europe (45 billion cubic meters) amounts to under 5% of its own production which has been increasing every year. Most of that hasn't even been sent yet so the percentage up to now is even smaller. So yeah this was never about the US selling natural gas to Europe.

You have to add on the 34 bcms to the 45 bcms for a total of 79 billion cubic meters expected to be exported to Europe in 2022. Prices in Europe for gas seem to be about 10X higher than in the USA. Costs of LNG export are also higher, but I imagine the profit return on those European sales is about as large as their total profit on all domestic USA sales (and note domestic prices have doubled as well). This is pretty…

> This is pretty basic supply and demand stuff. It's hard not to conclude that a major US goal was cutting Europe off from Russian gas, and replacing that with American LNG. You can find all sorts of quotes to this effect from the US government before 2022:

It’s actually very easy to conclude that this is not the case because selling a few billion dollars worth of oil simply isn’t worth global destabilization. To the extent that this was some sort of “goal” of the US (under the Trump admin I’m guessing?) it’s a minor goal at best.

The reason Biden for example said that the pipeline was a bad idea was because Europe was placing its energy security in the hands of Russia, which as we saw turned out to be a bad idea. Note previous Russian aggression in Crimea in 2014, etc.

Similarly to “NATO expansion” being a dog whistle to anti-American sentiment the “the US wants to sell gas” is another attempt to distract from much more plain and serious truths such as Putin simply thought he’d be able to take over Ukraine and wanted to do so.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#104

Post by [deleted] »

radu_floricica wrote: post #64
tsimionescu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's almost delusional. It's like you don't understand what drought is, or haven't looked at any of the predictions about heat waves, the mass extinction events, the extreme weather, the fires... This is a new level of madness from the fight against the fight against climate change. Don't look up, my friend.

Yeah, delusional. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... > 8·52% were cold-related and 0·91% were heat-related [...] Eastern Europe had the highest heat-related excess death rate and Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest cold-related excess death rate. Or look here and show me the disasters we're likely to have: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/ Cause a see a bunch of "not good", but I someh…

[deleted]

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#105

Post by eunos »

bertil wrote: post #21
uri4 wrote: post #15

Lets hope climate warming will kick in this winter. Or 30 million refugees from Ukraine will flood Europe...

There might be as many people from Pakistan, East Africa, or China who have to migrate because of global warming this winter too. Not sure whether they’ll go to Europe, but millions isn’t an exaggeration in those cases.

>China

D Folks from Dongbei moved to South even as far as Sanya because of the warm among other reasons. Warmer Dongbei might attract more people back.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#106

Post by ericmay »

photochemsyn wrote: post #70
dotancohen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines ... that mostly leaves > the USA as the primary supplier. Does that suggest motive for the destruction? Who else has both motive and means?

The means is an interesting question. Having done a little scuba diving, the depth of the pipelines (70-90 meters) put it out of range of any diver without a sophisticated mix of gases (Trimix diving). A remotely operated vehicle would also work. The pipelines were made of thick steel wrapped with concrete, so some kind of high-tech explosive was necessary, perhaps shaped charges (used in the oil industry for blowing…

Not really. If Russia wanted to continue to sell gas to Europe it could end the war against Ukraine (or have never started it in the first place). Gas sales aren’t a high priority there. Putin doesn’t care one bit about those, and likely had the pipeline blown up as a “no way back” for those who might have wanted to negotiate behind his back.

The US blowing up NS2 for a few billion dollars worth of gas sales is beyond stupid because it risks completely ruining all of the momentum the US has in isolating Russia and having its military completely implode. If your view is that the Russians are the enemy (as the US view is) why would you stop them from making a terrible mistake or put any of that at risk? You wouldn’t.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#107

Post by tsimionescu »

radu_floricica wrote: post #64
tsimionescu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's almost delusional. It's like you don't understand what drought is, or haven't looked at any of the predictions about heat waves, the mass extinction events, the extreme weather, the fires... This is a new level of madness from the fight against the fight against climate change. Don't look up, my friend.

Yeah, delusional. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... > 8·52% were cold-related and 0·91% were heat-related [...] Eastern Europe had the highest heat-related excess death rate and Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest cold-related excess death rate. Or look here and show me the disasters we're likely to have: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/ Cause a see a bunch of "not good", but I someh…

> https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/

You're linking the 1.5 degrees warming report, which is already known to be an impossible target, the warming we'll reach if we stop carbon emissions completely by 2050; 2 degrees is the new target. We are nowhere near to being on track for such a goal, so you should actually look at the 3+ degrees predictions.

I should admit that I was somewhat wrong to bring up droughts - the report is much more concerned with flooding. I also forgot one of the most catastrophic predictions - the melting of the polar ice caps and resulting ocean level increase - but I suppose that's also a net positive in your book, somehow.

Regarding the increased frequency of extreme weather, the reports are again very clear [0]:

> It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver14 of these changes. Some recent hot extremes observed over the past decade would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. Marine heatwaves have approximately doubled in frequency since the 1980s (high confidence), and human influence has very likely contributed to most of them since at least 2006.

> It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category 3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades, and it is very likely that the latitude where tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific reach their peak intensity has shifted northward; these changes cannot be explained by internal variability alone (medium confidence).

> Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events18 since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence), fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence), and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence).

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#108

Post by euroderf »

dotancohen wrote: post #55
paganel wrote: post #39

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.

"Welcome to Bauxite Island"

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#109

Post by actionfromafar »

pavlov wrote: post #58
dotancohen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines ... that mostly leaves > the USA as the primary supplier. Does that suggest motive for the destruction? Who else has both motive and means?

Selling more gas to Europe isn’t a massive windfall to USA. The Biden administration has bigger fish to fry and wouldn’t risk such an intervention in Swedish waters just as Sweden is joining NATO. My money is on Russian hardliner factions operating rogue without Putin’s approval. He can’t admit he doesn’t know who did it. The Russian state security apparatus is so large, we have no idea what kind of internal tensions…

My money is on Putin doing it, to dissuade any would be throne-pretenders in case of a coup. Any new government has fewer funding options, which would be good to negotiate with Europe, and to pay cooperating oligarchs.

It would be cutting the nose to spite the face, except Putin is cutting Russia's nose, not his own. What matters is staying in power, not the good of the nation.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#110

Post by m000 »

kuratkull wrote: post #97
m000 wrote: post #62

Gas prices plummeting, energy bills soaring. The market will regulate itself. /s

People seem to expect the free market to adapt immediately, for consumers immediate benefit. The market will regulate itself, but it may not happen in timeframes that people are comfortable with.

No, consumers just expect it to show consistent reaction times.

A rumour is typically enough to warrant an overnight price hike in consumer prices. While for experiencing reductions, consumers have to wait for a few months for the market to "adapt". And in the end, it usually is the consumers that adapt to the increased prices, so companies don't see any good reason to reduce them.

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