Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The excellent WattsUpWithThat? article presenting the energy challenges pitting U.S. and Russia’s global dominance in natural gas production thus setting the stage for international business export customer competition also exposes another global energy dilemma brought about by the ill-considered, ludicrous and scientifically unjustified climate alarmist policies of the EU.
lEurope’s dominating and impractical green energy policies combined with their anti-nuclear, anti-coal (even though coal continues to dominate electrical energy production because of renewable energy failures), anti-shale, etc. positions have resulted in the EU and its economy becoming a prisoner of and incredibly dependent upon foreign energy providers and unable to establish control of their own energy and economic destiny.
At the present time Germany, the economic driving engine of the EU, has become dependent on Russian supplied natural gas and this dependence is set to grow even more so in the future.
Germany is heavily lobbying for the building of a 10 billion euro second major natural gas pipeline, known as the Nord Stream 2, to significantly increase the amount of Russian natural gas that can be imported directly from Siberia.
Germany already receives about 40% of the gas it consumes from Russia and this figure will likely increase to over 50% by 2025.
Other EU countries have concerns about the new Russian/German pipeline because of the increased energy dependence upon Russia that such a pipeline would create for the EU.
Some EU countries are also concerned about the increased hub role that Germany would need to play in distributing natural gas to other EU nations because of the increased pipeline imports.
Additionally some segments of the route for the proposed pipeline lie outside the jurisdiction of the EU raising uncertain legal concerns.
The newly created sanctions the U.S. has assessed against Russia are also creating uncertainty for the EU regarding the building and use of the new proposed pipeline.
It is extraordinary that here in the U.S. there is so much hype from the mainstream media about alleged government ties to Russia at a time where America has established itself as a global energy giant and in complete control of its economic and energy future.
At the same time the EU has, because of its ridiculous climate alarmist folly, allowed its economic and energy future to become a prisoner of energy policy dictated by foreign governments – most prominently the Russian government.
Why worry about europe…it is a gonner RoyW. Spencer, Ph. D. says:
June 2, 2017 at 8:43 AM
I don’t care if we are a laughingstock to a bunch of countries whose claim to fame is artists and musicians who died hundreds of years ago. Some of us laugh at you, too. Your countries are slowly dying, culturally and economically.
Good luck.
Gazprom probably owns Greenpeace the way the KGB owned the CND
The H1tlerite foaming-at-the-mouth (literally in the case of CNN talking heads) genocidal Russophobic racist hatred that has seized the American left wing media and political establishment is not going to lead anywhere good. If McCain could do everyone a favour and just drop dead finally, that might help some rationality to return.
I can’t stand Mcain but stop with the drop dead stuff that is unacceptable.
There are a number of reports that the kind of cancer McCain has can be cured by cannabis. McCain is against cannabis. Just deserts.
I would be fine with McCrap being locked in a secure medical facility where his Alzheimers could be stopped from doing further damage to America.
I’m sorry for the extreme language, but this is an existential threat to democracy, just like the Na3is.
They can’t and won’t accept that the American people voted for Donald Trump.
Instead they spin the tale that a few deplorable red-necks with the help of an army of Russian hackers stole the election.
This is a totalitarian power-grab. It means war.
Ptolemy
Agreed
Meanwhile the EU is trying to kill diesel engines while Germany attempts to save it after cheating the world.
The dependence of most of Europe on Russian natural gas presents a great opportunity for the United States, if we are smart enough to take advantage of it. With advances in fracking, particularly in the Marcellus Shale area of Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the United States produces more natural gas than it consumes.
The EU has always been hesitant to impose sanctions on Russia when it has been aggressive (invading Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine) because the EU fears that Russia will cut off the supply of natural gas. The United States can help the EU overcome that fear by building many LNG export terminals along our east coast, which can supply the EU with the gas they need if Russia cuts off the supply. This would have the double benefit of helping our European allies in need, and would also provide thousands of high-paying jobs in the eastern United States.
Former President Obama was too attached to the anti-carbon lobby to allow development of LNG export terminals, but is President Trump willing to reverse this trend, which could create jobs and gain him votes in critical states like North Carolina, Virginia, and possibly Maryland?
Kind of ironic. Denmark switched to “renewables” in response to the oil embargo. Now, it appears dependence on foreign energy sources can’t be avoided with those energy from weather towers and panels. They’ve had over 40 years to make this work and still, it’s a FAIL. People never learn, do they?
How do you go about repairing a pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic? just wondered. I guess you call in the specialists from countries most concerned about the damage, as in the case of emergency canopies over the Chernobyl reactor.
Well, it does make more sense than clear cutting US forests and shipping wood pellets to the UK. But then making sense has never been part of the green economic and political equations.
Pipelines of any sort, to use John Robb’s term (GlobalGuerillas.typepad.com) are a systempunkt – an inevitably insecure part of an overall infrastructure. And so, as such, they are vulnerable to a very wide range of threats, ranging from the state that controls the overall flow, to that from the numerous malcontents all along the route.
Not the happiest position for the EU in general, or for Germany in particular, to be in…..
Look on the bright side, though. There’s all that coal and lignite…..currently (sorry) supplying around half of total electricity output, and essential for synchronous baseload and frequency stability (http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/france-germany-turn-coal/). South Australia’s travails, in this context, are relevant: like Germany, it’s the crash-test-dummy for a large intermittents generation percentage, but without the needed extent of interconnects which supply frequency stabilisation and black-start capabilities (http://joannenova.com.au/2017/08/sa-solves-blackouts-crisis-partly-by-closing-holden-factory/).
Plus there are the German cross-border interconnects which can act as a sink or a source. But Germany had not consulted sufficiently with its power-connected neighbours about these flows, and dumping or drawing power affects those countries’ grids, often at short notice and in un-negotiated ways. So the other countries have effectively started to shield themselves from unwanted flows, and this generates (sorry) a call for an ‘EU-wide Energiewende’ (https://energytransition.org/2017/02/why-germany-needs-a-european-energiewende/). The political probability of this occurring is, as can be imagined, fairly much a textbook definition of zero/zip/nada/nyet…..
Another bashing article from the “MAGA” ideolgy.
How much the external dependency rose with Renewables in the EU in the last 20 years? The answer is funny,
That explains why the USA is decaying. The mix between ideology and science. And bashing the EU.