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PPoliticians are often sales geniuses, and this is particularly true of the current president of the United States: Donald Trump once touted American natural gas on the world market as “freedom gas.” The fuel extracted by the controversial method of “fracking” was intended to help liberate the countries of the world from their dependence on Russian oil and gas monopolists.
The oil and gas business has always been highly politicized and remains at the center of the geostrategic planning of the great powers. It was probably not due to purely economic considerations that Germany began building three liquefied gas ports on the North Sea coast a few years ago.
Frozen liquefied gas, also known as LNG, delivered by tanker truck should limit the market power of Europe’s leading natural gas supplier, Russia. The EU Commission also considered this to be sensible.
“The expansion of the LNG infrastructure in Germany,” confirms a spokesperson for the Federal Economy Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU), “is a major concern of the federal government. The LNG ordinance that came into force in 2019, for example, specifically improves the conditions for the construction of LNG. ” -Infrastructure ”. Among other things, the federal government forced the gas network operators to ensure the connection of the onshore gas pipeline to the liquefied gas ports.
By supporting the three liquefied gas terminals in the ports of Brunsbüttel, Stade and Wilhelmshaven, the federal government pursued another purpose. In particular, the ports are intended to allow the importation of “liquefied natural gas” from the US and thus quell the anger of the US government over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany.
The Trump administration and Republican congressmen recently threatened German partners in the pipeline project with sanctions if they did not immediately stop their work on the underwater tube on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Americans resent being engaged in the military defense of Germany and Europe, while these European partners pay for weapons there with their purchases of natural gas from Russia.
If the federal government had hoped to get American approval for the Nord Stream gas pipeline, if at the same time US fracking gas import opportunities were created, this was hit hard on Friday: Düsseldorf power company Uniper, announced that he planned to do it in Wilhelmshaven. Put the LNG project on hold for now.
However, the fact that the port project’s most important foreign policy driver is no longer with liberty gas exporter Trump these days is likely due to chance.
In reality, Uniper could not find enough interested parties among the world’s gas exporters who would have been willing to reserve long-term capacity at the Wilhelmshaven terminal. And without the security of these fixed-use contracts, the complex infrastructure project worth several hundred million euros cannot be financed.
Japan or China are more interesting markets than Europe
The disinterest shown by liquefied gas exporters from the US, Australia, Qatar and Egypt is due to the current uncertainties in the market. After all, the LNG business is growing rapidly, but it is also growing very fast. When demand for liquefied gas spikes suddenly in Asia and higher prices are offered there, oil tankers bound for Europe spontaneously change course offshore.
Price relationships have recently been such that it is already more lucrative to ship LNG tankers to Japan or China than to Western Europe, which is well supplied by Russian pipelines. After liquefied gas terminals were built in numerous European countries in the last ten years, also with the help of the US, gas exporters from abroad now apparently see little reason to engage with other LNG ports in Germany.
Uncertainties about the development of demand in the wake of the crown crisis, European climate policy and international trade conflicts also contributed to the fact that gas exporters turned their backs on the German port project.
The Uniper company, which once grew out of the E.on and Ruhrgas Group’s fossil power plant division, does not want to completely stop the project in Wilhelmshaven. Now it will be checked if a smaller variant is found with more interest.
After all, the floating LNG terminal was designed to be very large for a throughput of ten billion cubic meters of liquefied gas. The volume corresponded to around a tenth of Germany’s gas needs. The possibilities for importing hydrogen at this location will now also be included in the planning.
“LNG is a growing market and natural gas is increasingly contributing to the security of supply and decarbonization of the global energy system,” Uniper CEO Andreas Schierenbeck said: “That is why Uniper will remain committed to the safe supply of LNG “.
All of this will “now be intensively discussed with those who, like me, regard the development of such an import terminal in Germany as a fascinating idea and continue to support it,” continues Schierenbeck. A wave from the fence post heading for politics.
But there is little clarity about the federal government’s willingness to get the LPG ports up and running even without sufficient market demand. On the one hand, federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) is said to have promised tax money. On the other hand, the Federal Ministry of Economy emphasizes the private sector nature of LNG projects.
Plans to build a liquefied gas port under the name “Hanseatic Energy Hub” in Stade near Hamburg are currently underway. Project partners include chemical giant Dow and Niedersachsen Ports GmbH. Also in Brunsbüttel, project partners around Dutch companies Gasunie and Royal Vopak are sticking to plans for a “German LNG terminal” for the time being.
Nord Stream 2 continues
Meanwhile, Russian work on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline appears to continue. Threats of US sanctions against the project’s European partners, including BASF subsidiary Wintershall, Uniper, and the port company Sassnitz / Mukran, were met with unanimous protests from German state and federal politicians and have so far not sparked interruption of work.
Earlier in the year, a Swiss shipping company had called on its cargo ships to abandon the project. However, the Russian energy company Gazprom is reportedly upgrading its own pipe-laying ships so that it can complete construction of the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 next year, even against the will of the Americans.
The temporary suspension of project planning in Wilhelmshaven is fueling hopes of being able to do without the infrastructure for fossil natural gas entirely among environmentalists. Lower Saxony’s Environment and Energy Minister Olaf Lies (SPD), for example, already favors a terminal for hydrogen or synthetically produced gas as a possible replacement.
“We still need a terminal in exactly the same place, we have to continue to transport power by ship,” Lies said. “But now, I think, the decision has been made that it can only be renewable and no longer fossil.”
However, with this assessment, Lower Saxony comes into conflict with the recommendations of the coal exit commission. He had advised more gas-fired power plants so that he could quickly offset the politically determined exit from nuclear and coal plants without risking supply bottlenecks.
As gas reserves in the British and Norwegian North Sea tend to be depleted and large natural gas fields in the Netherlands are also reducing their production, Europe is likely to continue to depend on adequate infrastructure for importing natural gas. .
Especially if gas power plants are only used as “backup” to save periods without wind and solar power, it could be more economical in the future to have the fuel delivered on demand by LNG tankers rather than maintaining a gas supply permanent through gas pipelines.
According to the concepts of the gas industry, in the medium term more and more green hydrogen could be added to soil methane. In this way, the gas supply can be made gradually climate neutral without having to give up the multi-billion dollar pipeline system in the ground.
