Pipelines

[trysail]

Russia's Gazprom is the world's largest owner of natural gas reserves. Its Western-audited hydrocarbon reserves dwarf those of ExxonMobil.

China's large economy and appetite for energy makes it an obvious market for Russia's natural gas.

Gazprom is Europe's largest supplier of natural gas.

It was roughly a decade ago that Europe suffered a disruption and shortfall of natural gas supplies because a pipeline across Ukraine ceased deliveries. The Russian company supplying gas to Europe (Gazprom) said that Ukraine was responsible for the suspension. Ukraine said it was Russia's (i.e., Gazprom's) fault. Nobody really knows the truth.

A lot of people are now fully cognizant of the wide and pervasive extent of corruption and bribery in Ukraine.

In any event, Gazprom vowed that it would commence construction of a second pipeline under the North Sea (Nord Stream 2) bypassing Ukraine to ensure a reliable gas supply to Europe.

Today's pipeline ceremony marks the fruition of Gazprom's plan to expand its export markets and diversify its export distribution system.

Russia Begins Sending Natural Gas To China Through New Pipeline

by Bill Chappell
NPR

"(NPR)... Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a new China-Russia natural gas pipeline on Monday, connecting a Siberian gas field to a city in northeastern China...

...When it's fully completed, the pipeline will span more than 5,000 miles, joining a 3,000-kilometer (1,864 miles) section in Russia with a 5,111-km (3,176 miles) stretch in China, eventually terminating in Shanghai...

...For Russia, the pipeline to China is one of three high-profile energy projects Gazprom is carrying out. The other two plans reflect Russian partnerships with Germany and Turkey — U.S. allies and fellow NATO members.

Despite repeated objections from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, Russia is building the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline through the Baltic Sea — a project that would allow Russia to sharply increase its gas exports to Germany, with a maximum annual capacity of 55 billion cubic meters.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is expected to open within months..."


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[trysail]

China, Russia launch massive joint gas pipeline


By YANAN WANG and DARIA LITVINOVA
Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — China and Russia launched on Monday a gas pipeline that is more than 6,000 kilometers (3,750 miles) long, an outcome of their long-planned energy partnership.

As its relationships with Europe and the United States have grown more volatile, Russia is looking to bring its vast natural gas resources to the east. China is the world’s largest energy consumer and needs new supply sources to meet domestic demand...

...The pipeline bolsters the nations’ ties while China is embroiled in a trade dispute with the U.S. It stems from a $400 billion deal signed in 2014 by Russian state energy giant Gazprom, which agreed to deliver 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to China National Petroleum Corp for the next 30 years. Gazprom built the Russian side of the pipeline, which runs from new Siberian gas fields to the Chinese border..."


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[trysail]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Power_of_Siberia_Map.png/916px-Power_of_Siberia_Map.png


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[trysail]

Update On New York's Self-Inflicted Energy Crunch

by Francis Menton ("Manhattan Contrarian")
B.A., Yale College
J.D., Harvard University
Retired Partner, Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher LLP

"...In August, the first inklings of the crunch began to hit. As I reported on September 3, after the cross-harbor pipeline was blocked in May, the natural gas utility named National Grid, which covers Long Island (including the parts of New York City known as Brooklyn and Queens) announced that it could not accept any additional gas customers. By August, some 3000 potential customers in that area had been denied service. These included people who had just renovated a house and now found that they had no functioning heat system, and others who planned to open restaurants but now found they had no functioning stove or oven. Within days, the affected customers were all over their state legislators, and the legislators were demanding action.

In other words, we had upon us a one hundred percent self-inflicted impending crisis, about 90% of it the personal responsibility of the Governor, with maybe a 10% assist from the legislature. So how has the Governor reacted? If the answer is not obvious to you, then you clearly will never qualify for political office.

The answer is that the Governor reacted by blaming National Grid. On November 12 he issued a letter to the utility, claiming that it had failed to provide “adequate and reliable service,” and threatening to revoke its operating permit unless it immediately resumed acceptance of new customers in its service area. Excerpt:

The essential responsibility for a utility to provide adequate and reliable service is to manage the supply and demand. The very lack of supply you now point to as the reason for your denial of service to thousands of customers exhibits your failure to plan for supply needs. Your fundamental legal obligation as mandated by your certificate of operation was to plan and provide for future needs. You failed by your own admission.​

But hadn’t they made a perfectly reasonable plan for a pipeline that then got blocked by the Governor himself? That doesn’t count!..."​

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But wait! There's more!

A comment on the above by "GlobalTrvlr":

"...Along with all that you listed, Cuomo and the governor before him have cancelled or blocked every pipeline coming into NY from the west - and that effectively blocks all of New England from receiving much needed NG. The result has been for the last several years that electricity prices have skyrocketed in the winter. Utilities are required to stockpile several months of fuel, but that is very difficult to do with NG, so most NG plants are equipped as "dual fuel" and can burn either NG or some type of distillate - fuel oil or diesel. That can be stored easily enough, but costs a lot more than NG. So, every winter when NG has to be prioritized to hospitals, home heating and other customers that have no backup, the utilities have to burn fuel oil, driving the costs up. It has also affected all of New England this way to the point that they have to build LNG receiving stations (which take compressed LNG off of ships and uncompress it and get it ready to pump into the existing pipeline. And this has also caused the lunacy of New England gas companies buying Russian LNG to serve New England - when the US has plenty of gas for them, but New York is blocking the access..."​

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[trysail]

...and the Germans are, of course, in the process of attempting to commit economic seppuku by shutting down their nuclear electricity generating fleet and fantasizing that they can operate a modern industrial economy without fossil fuels. Meanwhile, China is in desperate need of gas to fuel its insatiable energy demand.



Putin's Grand Gas Project Makes Sense Now

by Leonid Bershidsky

"(Bloomberg Opinion)...The finishing touches to the project, begun in 2001 with the construction of the Blue Stream pipeline to Turkey, include the launch of the Power of Siberia pipeline to China on Dec. 2... In the 2000s, when Putin and his advisers nurtured the notion of Russia as an “energy superpower,” it became clear to Kremlin strategists that they needed more flexibility to increase supplies and get more economic leverage over neighbors in Europe and Asia. Blue Stream, laid across the bottom of the Black Sea to the Turkish port of Samsun and opened in 2003, was the opening move of the Putin gas game.

But Blue Stream’s capacity of 16 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year was dwarfed by the roughly 180 billion cubic meters the Soviet-built pipelines could export to Europe via Ukraine and Belarus. It helped Russia compete in Turkey, but didn’t solve the bigger problem of Russia’s dependence on Ukraine and Belarus. The share of European natural gas imports that came from Russia kept falling. In 2011, Russia obtained full control over the Belarussian gas transit system in exchange for discounted gas supplies. But Ukraine remained firmly in control of its pipelines, which accounted for the lion’s share of Russia’s export capacity.

Putin wanted more direct access to southern and western Europe. He wanted to be able to bypass Ukraine, for both economic and political reasons. The Ukrainian pipeline system, run by National JSC Naftogaz Ukraine, was falling into disrepair, and Gazprom, the Russian export monopoly for pipeline gas, feared it might have to invest in fixing it without having much influence over its operation. At the same time, Putin wanted leverage over the Ukrainian government to keep it in Moscow’s orbit. Twice in the 2000s, Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine [this is disputed; knowing what we know about Ukraine, there is reason to believe that it was the Ukrainians who cut off the gas in order to obtain leverage over Gazprom] to try to bring it to heel, but without alternative export routes, such tactics were unsustainable. In 2012, Russia made another major move with the opening of Nord Stream, stretching across the bottom of the Baltic Sea to northern Germany. With a capacity of 55 billion cubic meters a year, it boosted Russia’s share of European imports. At the same time, Russia was planning a major pipeline to southern Europe, South Stream, across the Black Sea to Bulgaria. From there it would branch out to carry gas to Greece, Italy, Serbia and on to central Europe...

...Ukraine wasn’t just an inconvenient partner, it was an adversary [and utterly corrupt], and bypassing it became a geopolitical necessity for Putin. Europe, too, was more worried than ever about increasing gas exports from Russia, which could use it to expand its political influence. The European Union scuppered South Stream in late 2014 by putting pressure on Bulgaria. Plans to expand Nord Stream by laying two parallel strings of pipe, known as Nord Stream 2, also became politically toxic, especially given U.S. resistance to that project: In Washington, fears of increased Russian leverage over Germany were compounded by the desire to supply more U.S. liquefied natural gas to Europe...


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(monitors please note that the above quotation is less than five paragraphs)

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[bellisarius]

Just to mention in passing, New York taxes natural gas just like any other retail item. That is to say it's taxed at a percentage of the billed cost delivered. So, the higher the price, the more money the state (and local taxation authority) gets. In other words it's in the states best interests to keep the prices as high as possible.

I didn't bother looking up the tax policies of the New England states but I'm pretty certain that at the least Mass. and Conn. have the same policies.

New York will allow a pipeline as soon as they can figure out how to tax it.

 

[trysail]

The climate nutjobs (and the watermelons [i.e., "green on the outside, red on the inside"]) shot themselves in the foot with their superstition-based obstructionism and climate pseudoscience.






Trump Administration Proposes Major Changes To Bedrock Environmental Law

by Jeff Brady

"(NPR) Federal agencies may not have to consider climate change when approving big new infrastructure projects, such as highways or oil and gas pipelines, under new rules proposed by the Trump administration..."



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[trysail]

The only reason the lights didn't go out in the middle of winter two years ago in New England was the emergency diversion of an LNG tanker carrying Russian gas.

It's only a matter of time 'til the lights go out in New England.





Costs, delays scuttle 124-mile Constitution Pipeline project
By MARY ESCH

"ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The nearly $1 billion Constitution Pipeline project, which had been designed to take natural gas from Pennsylvania’s shale gas fields to metropolitan New York and New England, has been abandoned after years of legal regulatory challenges made it economically unfeasible, a spokeswoman for project partner Duke Energy said Monday...

...“Natural gas remains a critical part of our country’s clean energy future, and Williams is well-positioned to take advantage of the growing demand for natural gas as a reliable, low cost and clean alternative for power generation fuel, heating oil and diesel,” the pipeline giant said.

Environmental activists continue to fight another nearly $1 billion Williams project, the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project, which would extend an existing pipeline to carry natural gas from Pennsylvania through New Jersey to New York City and Long Island. New York and New Jersey regulators have previously denied permits but allowed Williams to reapply..."


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[thør]

One would think that the Russians would engineer a 56" pipeline so it wouldn't pop up from the seabed and float.