Gas from the East: or how you will pay for the war out of your own pocket
This morning we published a report from Reuters that the US has contacted large Western energy companies to assess the impact of completely cutting off Russian gas supplies to Western Europe. The answers have not been positive: no one can suddenly replace a third of the European gas imported now from Russia.
Russia does not even need to make any particular declarations to put Germany and its Western allies in trouble. Putin, like Julius Caesar, could say "It's so difficult for me to make threats, so easy for me to put them into practice", indeed, he doesn't even need to speak. Two conclusive facts in place:
- The Yamal pipeline, which is supposed to lead Russian gas to Germany via Poland, is instead drawing gas from German depots to bring it to Poland. Not a breath of gas has arrived from Moscow for 26 days …
- The pipeline that carries gas to Riga , Latvia, from the Valdai, will coincidentally close next week for "maintenance work".
For Gasprom it is not even necessary to write, discuss, communicate: it simply turns off the gas, or, coincidentally, finds itself in the situation of having to carry out scheduled maintenance according to how. After all, one of the Russian emphases towards Germany is related to the refusal to use a brand new plant, and loaded with gas, such as Nord Stream 2, to continue using plants that the Russians consider "Old" such as Yamal and the others. plants passing through Ukraine.
However, one begins to realize that without Russian gas, a high economic price will be paid, and this is reflected in the future price of natural gas on the Dutch market (Dutch Natgas TTF).
After a sharp drop in prices, linked to the news first, and then to the arrival of natural gas via tankers, from the US to Europe, we are now back to seeing prices rising. The US, or the countries of the Middle East, cannot replace 100% Russian gas, if only because there is a lack of sufficient regasifiers. Nobody ever thought that Western Europe should depend on liquid gas. We can think of increasing the production of European gas, especially in Italy and Eastern Europe, even from Schist (Poland), but these are not operations that can be implemented in a week or even in a month.
So if the conflict with Russia were to worsen further we will surely have a fallen one: the European industry and consumers. Without gas, or with gas at exorbitant prices, heavy and medium industry stops. To reduce consumption there will be no other means than to raise prices skyrocketing. They want us to go to war with guns against cheap tanks, and the blame lies with Berlin, Brussels, Washington. Unfortunately we are on a train that we cannot command.
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The article Gas from the East: or how you will pay, out of your own pocket, the war comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/gas-da-oriente-ovvero-come-voi-pagherete-di-tasca-vostra-la-guerra/ on Sun, 16 Jan 2022 11:19:34 +0000.