Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The actions being proposed by British Prime Minister Theresa May against Russia for its recent chemical weapons attack on British soil have escalated the political reality of the consequences Europe will face because of its still growing dependence on Russian natural gas for its present and future growing energy needs.
Britain has become increasingly dependent on imported energy to meet its energy needs as has the rest of the Europe.
Instead of embracing the lower cost energy, availability and reliability of increased oil and natural gas that can be achieved through fracking technology Britain has been slow to change its energy course from its climate policy mandates for costly and unreliable renewables.
Prime Minister May’s government is now exploring alternatives that can be undertaken to decrease the countries increasing reliance on Russian natural gas.
All of Europe is facing growing needs for additional supplies of natural gas with Europe and Britain’s long standing energy policies focusing on climate change and renewable mandates further exasperating these growing and serious energy and political problems.
Natural gas provides the largest portion of Britain’s electrical energy with imports being a significant source for this energy fuel.
Britain imports about 44 per cent of its gas from Europe and Norway with Europe importing about 35 per cent of its gas from Russia.
Additionally Britain bought a shipment of liquefied natural gas from Russia to cope with severe cold weather at the end of February.
The UK has become increasingly reliant on gas imports because of declining gas from the North Sea and closure of storage facilities that supplied at peak as much as 70 per cent of its gas storage.
According to the Financial Times a U.S. liquefied natural gas tanker ship has now been diverted from its planned route and is now headed toward the U.K. which provides yet another indication of the severity of the natural gas energy and political problems associated with Europe and Britain’s increased reliance on Russian natural gas supplies.
These energy problems of Europe and Britain stand in stark contrast to the energy and climate policies of the Trump Administration which has positioned the U.S. to be an energy independent giant which is in full control of its present and future energy supply as well as being able to provide exports to a world which through poorly conceived energy and climate policy has become increasingly dependent on the Russians for meeting both present and future energy needs.
When the Germans invaded Russia, guess who their largest trading partner was?
May is nothing short of a total disaster across the board. She was the worst Home Secretary this country ever had and is going to top that stunning effort by becoming the worst ever British Prime Minister. There is something deeply unhinged in the woman’s head but the low cunning, deceit and treachery areas of her central nervous system are functioning in stellar form.
Funny how much respect she gained from this strong line then – if we are to go down the line of worst PMs – shes got a long way to go before she gets as bad as Ted Heath who got us into the EU mess we are in now by allowing unbelievably bad agreements to be put in place and lying to the general public as to the objectives of the then EEC.
Very difficult to judge leader on what they do now when we are talking everyday politics – it will need probably 50 years before one can truly judge a particular leader. Trump could very well be a disaster as most of the media predict but he could also be the catalyst for change in the USA’s political system. The same could be said about Brexit and one way or another Teresa May will be judged on this performance alone – unless of course a diplomatic incident such as this one blows up in her face!
Note the name game. Britain get 24% of their energy from ‘renewable’ energy = Good? Right?
A large part of the British ‘renewable’ energy is not green. i.e. It is a fact that a large part of the ‘renewable’ energy does not help the pointless effort to reduce CO2 emissions and harms the environment.
It is all a stupid pointless political game. Fake engineering studies. Fake science. Fake economics.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/uk-now-burning-33-of-worlds-wood-pellet-imports
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39053678
+10
Beside “missing” carbon you also have missing integrity and missing public policy competence. The only thing done well is tactics around the system.
Trump should outright BAN all bio-fuel exports, especially wood pellets, to the UK. Our southeast lowland swamp habitats being decimated by this nonsense.
http://cdn.audubon.org/cdn/farfuture/8FRO5mbatI8osVvX01Ir08AG6wFUTYy9OLZcH2LCAR4/mtime:1422305650/sites/default/files/MattEich_webopt-1.jpg
Let them cut down their own trees … oh wait … they hardly have any left.
http://www.aqua-firma.co.uk/editorfiles/Image/Sabah/Habitat-Loss-390(1).jpg
+100
Ban it now and ask questions later.
It’ll grow back. That clear cut will be forest within 10 years.
I don’t believe the UK government is stupid enough to believe that trashing forests to burn in Drax thereby emitting more plant food, err sorry polluting CO2 than burning coal would is really ‘saving the planet’ any more than I do.
What it does do, together with all those unsightly whirligigs and solar farms, is keep electricity prices nice and high so the sweetheart deal with the Chinese to build the new Hinkley nuclear power station doesn’t prompt too many to start asking awkward questions because there may be more to it than ‘the climate crisis’.
Here’s hoping more of my UK brethren start reading UKIP daily and vote accordingly in the next election. And even if our Westminster lovies really are just plain stupid then all the more reason to do so.
It’s been over a 150 years since we laid a transatlantic telegraph line to England so aren’t we ready for a transatlantic gas pipeline by now? I envision one nuke powered ship, (convert a retiring nuke aircraft carrier) as a continuous extruding/laying vessel being steadily supplied the plastic along the way. I’m just guessing … say a 6′ diameter pipe with a 6″ wall is 8.6 ft^2 area. About 2000 miles = 10,000,000′ from east Newfoundland to Pembroke comes to 3.4 million cubic yards of plastic to melt and extrude along the way. (Even with nuke power it’s going to take a lot of time to melt so much plastic – 5kts is probably optimistic?)
Good carbon sink! – the only problem with that is it would float, so how many tons of weights would be needed to sink it
They can weigh it down with spent nuclear fuel rods.
The problem is the Atlantic is getting wider by a couple of inches every year.
The transatlantic cable was broken repeatedly.
It was a lot easier to repair a wire cable than it will be to repair a pipeline.
So start the hunt for the trolls that helped this outcome along at the advocacy groups and online.
I am surprised renewables have cornered over 20% of Britain’s electricity market. Should be expensive, but probably subsidized.
It hasn’t, fake stats.
OK, I will check additional sources.
A good bit of that renewable figure is wood pellets that produce 15-20% more CO2 than the coal they replaced.
I can call coal “renewable” if I want to.
“Renewable” definition is arbitrary and capricious. Including in “renewables” coal, methane and uranium (all of which are only mined, transported, and turned into electricity by humans) makes it less capricious.
Humans are renewable. And natural.
I still don’t understand what would be the motive for Russia of the attempted murder, or, even if it had some reason, why Russia would use such mean (nerve gas? seriously?), instead of any more conventional way to achieve the same result. This looks very stupid. However, I know for sure that even the most experienced secret service DO make blunder from time to time, like, this sort of thing. So “this is most stupid” doesn’t rule out some Russian involvement.
On the other hand, I fully understand
* why Russia did, and still do, finance and help “green” anti-nuke, pacifist, anti-US, anti-fracking lobbies.
* why some UK politician with bad poll rating would discover some foreign enemy to gather support, and in this respect, Russia is just perfect
* why Putin is laughing, as this also work in Russia, and obviously helped his re-election
Have you read the news! It was an undetectable 2 part highly sophisticated toxin that only becomes toxic when mixed and was administered in powder form (the term used was nerve agent not gas). So they used a bang up to date easier to administer highly developed toxin designed specifically for this use. This nerve agent is a Russian product – for us to synthesize it would be to dishonour our international treaties. Within these treaties will be a clause that allows research into the defence against known toxins. Porton Down is subject to regular independent international checks on its operations
Ho do you know this Salisbury hit story isn’t all fake news, Mark?
How do you know that anyone was poisoned at all?
How do you know the entire incident isn’t a hoax?
Have you visited the victims in hospital and examined them personally?
Or are you putting your faith in sources that you can verify are honest, truthful and trustworthy?
Because I flaming well live there, I am ex services and some of my friends work at Porton Down thats how
You do not understand the motive for them trying to kill someone who was responsible for revealing some 300 Russian spies to the West, when perhaps they fear there is another potential traitor in the FSB? I suggest you could start by watching the Godfather films.
U.S. to Become a Major LNG Exporter :
There is currently only one operational liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in the United States; it has been operating since early 2016. Cheniere Energy is exporting LNG at its Sabine Pass facility with three trains and a capacity of about 2 billion cubic feet per day. Its total capacity is expected to be 3.5 billion cubic feet per day when all 5 trains are completed. Cheniere is in the process of getting contracts and financing for a sixth train.
There are five additional LNG projects under construction with a total capacity of about 7.5 billion cubic feet per day that will come online in 2018 and 2019, making total U.S. LNG export capacity about 10 or 11 billion cubic feet per day within just a few years. Four more projects with a capacity of almost 7 billion cubic feet per day are approved but not yet under construction. These terminals will make the United States one of the top three LNG exporters in the world; the other two major exporters are Australia and Qatar.[i] Australia is expected to overtake Qatar as the world’s largest LNG exporter by 2020.[ii]
Between 2016 and 2020, the United States is expected to account for about half of the 20 billion cubic feet per day of new LNG export capacity worldwide.
Alleged attack. The signature is there, but the evidence is circumstantial, and easily reproduced.
Well, it wasn’t the Libya solution, or the failed Syrian solution, where the identity of the attackers were published and praised.
I would expect that the current treatment that the Skripals are undergoing is to be kept in an induced coma (standard nerve agent practise I believe), from which they may never recover (this is a very effective agent). Until they do recover I would imagine sure fired proof is going to be hard to come by as the point of administration is still unclear.
However I dont think Teresa May would stand up in front of the worlds press and in full consultation with our European and Nato allies, and get their full support unless she was pretty sure of her ground and this would be the nature of the toxin. She would also have to be pretty sure of her ground to make the direct double accusation she did – either they were aware of the use of this toxin or they had lost control of its whereabouts. That would suggest that there are no identifiable sources of this toxin in the UK.
But who knows – the statement that Russia has no knowledge of this poisoning is after all so convincing isnt it(sarc)
Ok, it is just an incredible coincidence that the lab most likely to have the poison is a mere 12km down the road!
The UK’s most controversial military laboratory Porton Down* (The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory), the British army base, which analysed the nerve gas, that same lab that does pioneering research into chemical and biological weapons, is a mere 20 minutes down the road!
Sure, I follow you, there’s nothing to see here…Not!
*DSTL Employs 3,000 scientists and has an annual budget of £500 million.
good grief – really. Porton Down picked Salisbury because its within walking distance – really!!!! Thats your argument – you really are plucking at straws arent you. Its not an incredible coincidence, it is just a coincidence. By your reckoning then Litvenenko should have been attacked within walking distance of Aldermaston……..good grief
Scott Wilmot Bennett
Did it not occur to you that the Russians wanted the Porton Down Labs to be in on testing for the poison, partly so they could evaluate its capabilities including the ability (or not) to provide antidotes?
Drill here. Drill now. Pay less. Texas oil men proved Sarah Palin’s thesis to be true with fracking. Unfortunately, the self-anointed elite here were too stupid to understand and I suspect that the British elite are also. All of a sudden, Russia is out number one geopolitical foe. Hmmm….. The elite were too stupid to understand that at the time, also. They really aren’t very bright, are they.
“Britain imports about 44 per cent of its gas from Europe and Norway..”
What, has Norway moved? Has it shifted east into Asia? Or maybe this is that common misconception that Europe and the EU are the same thing. Maybe when the UK leaves the EU the UK, like Norway, will shift into another continent. Asia? Africa? Take your pick. Maybe like gender no longer having anything to do with biological facts, which continent you are in will no longer have anything to do with geography. Maybe we will all be able to decide for ourselves what continent we live in. It’s called Continental Self-Identity. (Israel and Morocco have already put this idea into practice by competing in the Eurovision Song Contest and Israel takes it a stage futher by competing in the European section of the qualifying stage for the Football World Cup. Turkey is dabbling with the idea by applying for membership of the European Union when the vast majority of its territory lies in Asia.) And anyone living in, say, the UK who wants to be regarded as Asian will have to be treated as such by everybody else. And anybody not treating that person as Asian will, of course, be a bullying hatemonger. Allied to this, of course, is the well-known fact that race is nothing more than a social construct. So we can now all identify ourselves as part of whatever race we want to. So, in a clever move, President Trump could declare that he is the first all-black, Asian President of the USA. And then the liberal media would have to treat him with the upmost respect. And anybody criticising him would just be a racist. And maybe one of the more imaginative academics who belong to the fictitious consensus could produce a paper proving that climate change is disrupting the location of continents and that by 2050 such relocation could cause world conflict as we have never seen it. Or that climate change is causing changes in people’s race. Something along the lines that extreme weather is making White people more Black and Black people more White. Furthermore he could discover that there is a 97% certainty that people living in a certain continent will grow tails unless carbon emissions are drastically reduced. As Louis Armstrong once sang, ‘it’s a wonderful world’.
Hey maybe the Russians can build a gas pipeline to South Australia and bypass the Australian gas fields in the process.
In a report published by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) in April 2011, World Shale Gas Resources: an Initial Assessment of 14 Regions outside the United States, technically recoverable shale gas resources in Europe were estimated at 605 Tcf. This represented a little over 9% of the global shale gas resource potential. I’m sure the discovery of potential has increased in the last 7 years. Why would Europe not expeditiously develop these domestic resources rather than depend on Russia? It boggles the mind.
Let’s not over-exaggerate: the pipeline map is simply wrong in its attempt to show that Nordstream gas flows to the UK. It doesn’t. Nordstream gas stays within Germany. There is a very big landing of Norwegian gas at Emden, just the German side of the border with the Netherlands, much of which supplies the Dutch H-gas (as opposed to the low calorific value L-gas, Groningen gas field supplied) network. Balgzand also takes gas direct from Dutch offshore and onshore production. The UK may get small quantities of LNG landed at Rotterdam and Dunkirk via the interconnector pipelines, but the Zeebrugge connector (the main volume flow) is supplied by Zeepipe – again from the Norwegian sector. Noway dominates UK imports, and has been squeezing out Qatar (and other) LNG. Only the cold snap saw the UK adding LNG imports, including so far 4 Yamal cargoes (the first of which was allegedly re-exported in early January, and another arrived after transshipment at Montoir, near St Nazaire, France). Most of the Yamal cargoes landed at continental ports have been transshipped for onward delivery to Asian customers.
UK gas imports:
Of course, Gazprom has a large London based gas trading operation, with over 1,000 personnel. They buy and sell gas, trading out of their Nordstream and Baumgarten availabilities and buying gas produced in the North Sea and onshore in Europe. Last year they claim to have sold 16bcm in the UK market – but every last cubic metre will have been purchased or obtained on exchange (Gazprom have no interest in Yamal LNG). Gazprom are planning to scale back their London office, repatriating many jobs to St Petersburg: this plan was already in place when the recent poisoning events took place.