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One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europ

One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europe. With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines, and with countries like Qatar refusing to alter long-term energy contracts to increase supplies to Europe, and with Iran still under the Trump-era sanctions (which Biden continued), that mostly leaves the USA as the primary supplier. See this from past summer: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-lng-exports-europe-track-surpass-biden-promise-2022-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-lng-exports-europ... > "...the United States has already sent more gas to Europe during the first six months of 2022 than it did in all 12 months of 2021. If exports to Europe continue at the same pace through the second half of 2022, the total increase over 2021 would be around 45 bcm [billion cubic meters]." > "Benchmark gas prices in Europe have averaged $34.06 per million British thermal units (mmBtu) so far in 2022 compared with $29.99 in Asia and $6.12 in the United States. That compares with average 2021 prices of $16.04 in Europe, $18.00 in Asia and $3.73 in the United States, data showed." This also results in U.S. electricity ratepayers having much larger bills, driving across-the-board inflation - but fossil fuel shareholders and executives are certainly raking in the profits. Mission accomplished? https://energynews.us/2022/10/12/natural-gas-prices-are-rising-thats-worse-news-for-ratepayers-than-utilities/ https://energynews.us/2022/10/12/natural-gas-prices-are-risi...

dotancohen 4y ago
> With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines ... that mostly leaves > the USA as the primary supplier. Does that suggest motive for the destruction? Who else has both motive and means?
- pavlov 4y ago
  Selling more gas to Europe isn’t a massive windfall to USA. The Biden administration has bigger fish to fry and wouldn’t risk such an intervention in Swedish waters just as Sweden is joining NATO. My money is on Russian hardliner factions operating rogue without Putin’s approval. He can’t admit he doesn’t know who did it. The Russian state security apparatus is so large, we have no idea what kind of internal tensions exist. Putin may have unleashed something he doesn’t control anymore.
  - aa-jv 4y ago
    >The Biden administration has bigger fish to fry and wouldn’t risk such an intervention in Swedish waters just as Sweden is joining NATO. This is a pretty naive perspective - Since when has Sweden ever stood up to the crimes and misdeeds of the USA? Sweden ranks up there with Australia in the "lackey-state underdog to the USA" rankings ..
    - pavlov 4y ago
      It's just not worth the Americans' time to be plotting such a thing now. Selling more natural gas is irrelevant to the Biden administration's survival. And there were general elections in both Sweden and Denmark within the past two months — terrible timing for such an offensive CIA operation in NATO waters because any information leak would have handed a potent electoral weapon to anti-American opposition parties. The Russians are already a very active presence in the Baltic Sea, and this attack fits with their general pattern of confusion and misdirection.
      - aa-jv 4y ago
        There is no evidence that the Russians were anywhere near the pipeline around the time it was destroyed. There is massive evidence that the US and its allies were operating in those waters, and up to something, leading up to the day of the attack. The idea that the US wouldn't jeapordize its relationship with the Baltic states in order to cut off a vital supply of economic resources to Europe is very, very naive. The US has done far worse to its so-called allies.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    My money is on Putin doing it, to dissuade any would be throne-pretenders in case of a coup. Any new government has fewer funding options, which would be good to negotiate with Europe, and to pay cooperating oligarchs. It would be cutting the nose to spite the face, except Putin is cutting Russia's nose, not his own. What matters is staying in power, not the good of the nation.
    - 4y ago
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  The means is an interesting question. Having done a little scuba diving, the depth of the pipelines (70-90 meters) put it out of range of any diver without a sophisticated mix of gases (Trimix diving). A remotely operated vehicle would also work. The pipelines were made of thick steel wrapped with concrete, so some kind of high-tech explosive was necessary, perhaps shaped charges (used in the oil industry for blowing holes in pipe casing to increase oil flow, for example). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas) See the EPA for details. I guess it's okay to link to this, it's an official US government site. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/casingperforatedoverview.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/casingperf... Perhaps locating both of the pipelines deep under the water would be difficult? Point being, the ability to do this might not be as exclusive to nation-states as it has been portrayed (note the ease with which the videographer found the pipelines with an ROV, although the big bubbles probably helped). So, who knows? As far as who benefited, well, Russia certainly seems to want to continue selling gas to Europe, and is pushing for repair of the pipelines. The USA wants to replace Russian gas with American LNG. Coming up with a reason for Russia to do it would require some mental gymnastics, I think. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/12/putin-offers-to-boost-gas-supplies-to-europe-via-nord-stream-2 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/12/putin-offers-to-bo...
  - ericmay 4y ago
    Not really. If Russia wanted to continue to sell gas to Europe it could end the war against Ukraine (or have never started it in the first place). Gas sales aren’t a high priority there. Putin doesn’t care one bit about those, and likely had the pipeline blown up as a “no way back” for those who might have wanted to negotiate behind his back. The US blowing up NS2 for a few billion dollars worth of gas sales is beyond stupid because it risks completely ruining all of the momentum the US has in isolating Russia and having its military completely implode. If your view is that the Russians are the enemy (as the US view is) why would you stop them from making a terrible mistake or put any of that at risk? You wouldn’t.
    - 4y ago
kstenerud 4y ago
> One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europe. No, it wasn't. America wasn't pushing to sell to Europe, and Europe was becoming more and more reliant on Russian and Asian gas. The shift to American gas (and every other country they can get it from) happened after Russia invaded Ukraine and then shut off the taps when Europe instituted sanctions. Iranian sanctions were mostly inertial, but have now turned out to be good considering that Iran is negotiating nuclear tech in exchange for shipping weapons to Russia.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  My view is that the split with Putin really started in late 2003, when Putin rejected an Exxon offer to take a controlling stake in Russian oil via the purchase of Yukos, and then jailed Khodorkosky (who was close to various USA interests) on tax evasion charges. Prior to that, Putin got a lot of favorable mention in the US press, he visited GW Bush in Texas, was an ally in the 'war on Terror' etc. If Putin had taken the offer, Russia would have become more like Saudi Arabia - i.e. part of the petrodollar recycling system. Putin's domestic popularity in Russia since then is largely due to the fact he redirected oil money to domestic economic growth and military reconstruction, rather than to Wall Street funds. Everything since then has been one pipeline war after another, from the perspective of energy deals at least. Georgia 2008, for example, was "not a pipeline war!" according to the Guardian (meaning a lot of people were saying it was, and they were pushing back). Note how the 2006 BTC pipeline route (Baku-Azerbaijan-Turkey) was chosen to bypass Russia? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia... After that, there were the two competing pipeline deals in Syria, c. 2009-2010. One was a Russia-Iran deal, one was a Qatar-Saudi-USA deal. In 2010, Assad took the Russia-Iran offer, and in 2011, Obama's government OKed a CIA destabilization-and-regime change program in Syria. If Syria had taken the other offer, I doubt that would have happened. This Ukraine war is just more of the same (plus, a new Cold War is good for military procurement budgets). Of course, energy geopolitics isn't the only issue, but anyone who has read Steve Coll's "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power", or Daniel Yergin's "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" will recognize it's often the central reason for international conflicts. As far as the clearly reprehensible human rights record of Putin being the reason for the conflict, that's laughable - just look at Mohammed bin "Bone Saw" Salman in Saudi Arabia, or the Yemen war. Now if MBS pulled out of Wall Street and ended the Saudi roll in petrodollar recycling, then we'd be hearing about the need for regime change. And if Putin and Assad had signed up for the petrodollar program, they'd be lauded as democratic reformers, and the Ukraine invasion would portrayed in the US media as a necessary action to dismantle neo-Nazi militias (see Yemen, again).
Sakos 4y ago
I was curious about exact numbers and found this in the most recent EU report: https://imgur.com/a/HIkyO05 https://imgur.com/a/HIkyO05
stefan_ 4y ago
LNG was never going to be competitive with pipeline gas, no one was in some "fight" over US or Russia selling to EU. But there sure is a long, long history of Russia using its gas supplies to blackmail and manipulate ex-USSR and other states, including using it's old puppet governments in Ukraine to literally disarm it. Their coercion extended to bombing pipelines, too, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_energy_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_en... Finally, the price of LNG is so high as to be thoroughly uninteresting for bulk uses like heating. That means it is rapidly being displaced by other methods like heat pumps. The future isn't "LNG from the US", it's "no gas" and current events have very much turbocharged that transformation.
marcinzm 4y ago
The US (in 2021) used 827 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year and produced 934. The amount it's expected to send to Europe (45 billion cubic meters) amounts to under 5% of its own production which has been increasing every year. Most of that hasn't even been sent yet so the percentage up to now is even smaller. So yeah this was never about the US selling natural gas to Europe.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  You have to add on the 34 bcms to the 45 bcms for a total of 79 billion cubic meters expected to be exported to Europe in 2022. Prices in Europe for gas seem to be about 10X higher than in the USA. Costs of LNG export are also higher, but I imagine the profit return on those European sales is about as large as their total profit on all domestic USA sales (and note domestic prices have doubled as well). This is pretty basic supply and demand stuff. It's hard not to conclude that a major US goal was cutting Europe off from Russian gas, and replacing that with American LNG. You can find all sorts of quotes to this effect from the US government before 2022: > (March 2021) "‘President Biden has been very clear, he believes the pipeline is a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States,’ Blinken says in Brussels" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/secretary-of-state-blinken-warns-europe-against-russias-nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-11616602442 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/secretary-of-state-blinken... So, if Europe's not going to get gas from Russia, who does that leave? Perhaps the glut of fracked American gas, provided in LNG tankers, instead? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/business/energy-environment/natural-gas-shale-chevron.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/business/energy-environme... (Sep 2021) "Natural Gas Boom Fizzles as a U.S. Glut Sinks Profits: Chevron’s multibillion-dollar write-down of gas assets is the most recent sign that the gas supply has far outstripped demand." These dots are not that hard to connect.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    >You have to add on the 34 bcms to the 45 bcms for a total of 79 billion cubic meters expected to be exported to Europe in 2022. The 34 was already being exported so it's sort of disingenuous to add it in terms of supply/demand impact. >Costs of LNG export are also higher, but I imagine the profit return on those European sales is about as large as their total profit on all domestic USA sales (and note domestic prices have doubled as well). Now you're making assumptions. >So, if Europe's not going to get gas from Russia, who does that leave? Transitioning to clean energy, nuclear, etc. >These dots are not that hard to connect. Thank you for finally not beating around the bush on what your actual point and angle are.
ed_balls 4y ago
"With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines" They are not destroyed. There are 4 pipes in total and 1 pipe of NS2 is intact. Most likely Russia destroyed the other pipes to get NS2 working (you want gas? Need to certify NS2 and we won't pay contract penalties, because this is not our fault) Resources blackmail didn't work, hence nuclear threats and mobilisation.
- ed_balls 4y ago
  Source for the downvoters https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/single-line-nord-stream-2-can-still-export-gas-analysts-say-2022-09-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/single-line-nord-str...
pcrh 4y ago
Is the difference in price between Europe and the US down to shipping costs?
- nyokodo 4y ago
  To transport Nat Gas you have to cool it down to -265F thereby reducing its volume 600X to transport economically as a liquid (LNG), then it needs to be safely turned back into a gas at its destination. That is expensive relative to pipeline fed Nat Gas.
andsoitis 4y ago
> Mission accomplished? What is the mission?

dotancohen 4y ago

> With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines ... that mostly leaves > the USA as the primary supplier. Does that suggest motive for the destruction? Who else has both motive and means?

pavlov 4y ago
Selling more gas to Europe isn’t a massive windfall to USA. The Biden administration has bigger fish to fry and wouldn’t risk such an intervention in Swedish waters just as Sweden is joining NATO. My money is on Russian hardliner factions operating rogue without Putin’s approval. He can’t admit he doesn’t know who did it. The Russian state security apparatus is so large, we have no idea what kind of internal tensions exist. Putin may have unleashed something he doesn’t control anymore.
- aa-jv 4y ago
  >The Biden administration has bigger fish to fry and wouldn’t risk such an intervention in Swedish waters just as Sweden is joining NATO. This is a pretty naive perspective - Since when has Sweden ever stood up to the crimes and misdeeds of the USA? Sweden ranks up there with Australia in the "lackey-state underdog to the USA" rankings ..
  - pavlov 4y ago
    It's just not worth the Americans' time to be plotting such a thing now. Selling more natural gas is irrelevant to the Biden administration's survival. And there were general elections in both Sweden and Denmark within the past two months — terrible timing for such an offensive CIA operation in NATO waters because any information leak would have handed a potent electoral weapon to anti-American opposition parties. The Russians are already a very active presence in the Baltic Sea, and this attack fits with their general pattern of confusion and misdirection.
    - aa-jv 4y ago
      There is no evidence that the Russians were anywhere near the pipeline around the time it was destroyed. There is massive evidence that the US and its allies were operating in those waters, and up to something, leading up to the day of the attack. The idea that the US wouldn't jeapordize its relationship with the Baltic states in order to cut off a vital supply of economic resources to Europe is very, very naive. The US has done far worse to its so-called allies.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  My money is on Putin doing it, to dissuade any would be throne-pretenders in case of a coup. Any new government has fewer funding options, which would be good to negotiate with Europe, and to pay cooperating oligarchs. It would be cutting the nose to spite the face, except Putin is cutting Russia's nose, not his own. What matters is staying in power, not the good of the nation.
  - 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
The means is an interesting question. Having done a little scuba diving, the depth of the pipelines (70-90 meters) put it out of range of any diver without a sophisticated mix of gases (Trimix diving). A remotely operated vehicle would also work. The pipelines were made of thick steel wrapped with concrete, so some kind of high-tech explosive was necessary, perhaps shaped charges (used in the oil industry for blowing holes in pipe casing to increase oil flow, for example). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas) See the EPA for details. I guess it's okay to link to this, it's an official US government site. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/casingperforatedoverview.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/casingperf... Perhaps locating both of the pipelines deep under the water would be difficult? Point being, the ability to do this might not be as exclusive to nation-states as it has been portrayed (note the ease with which the videographer found the pipelines with an ROV, although the big bubbles probably helped). So, who knows? As far as who benefited, well, Russia certainly seems to want to continue selling gas to Europe, and is pushing for repair of the pipelines. The USA wants to replace Russian gas with American LNG. Coming up with a reason for Russia to do it would require some mental gymnastics, I think. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/12/putin-offers-to-boost-gas-supplies-to-europe-via-nord-stream-2 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/12/putin-offers-to-bo...
- ericmay 4y ago
  Not really. If Russia wanted to continue to sell gas to Europe it could end the war against Ukraine (or have never started it in the first place). Gas sales aren’t a high priority there. Putin doesn’t care one bit about those, and likely had the pipeline blown up as a “no way back” for those who might have wanted to negotiate behind his back. The US blowing up NS2 for a few billion dollars worth of gas sales is beyond stupid because it risks completely ruining all of the momentum the US has in isolating Russia and having its military completely implode. If your view is that the Russians are the enemy (as the US view is) why would you stop them from making a terrible mistake or put any of that at risk? You wouldn’t.
  - 4y ago

kstenerud 4y ago

> One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europe. No, it wasn't. America wasn't pushing to sell to Europe, and Europe was becoming more and more reliant on Russian and Asian gas. The shift to American gas (and every other country they can get it from) happened after Russia invaded Ukraine and then shut off the taps when Europe instituted sanctions. Iranian sanctions were mostly inertial, but have now turned out to be good considering that Iran is negotiating nuclear tech in exchange for shipping weapons to Russia.

photochemsyn 4y ago
My view is that the split with Putin really started in late 2003, when Putin rejected an Exxon offer to take a controlling stake in Russian oil via the purchase of Yukos, and then jailed Khodorkosky (who was close to various USA interests) on tax evasion charges. Prior to that, Putin got a lot of favorable mention in the US press, he visited GW Bush in Texas, was an ally in the 'war on Terror' etc. If Putin had taken the offer, Russia would have become more like Saudi Arabia - i.e. part of the petrodollar recycling system. Putin's domestic popularity in Russia since then is largely due to the fact he redirected oil money to domestic economic growth and military reconstruction, rather than to Wall Street funds. Everything since then has been one pipeline war after another, from the perspective of energy deals at least. Georgia 2008, for example, was "not a pipeline war!" according to the Guardian (meaning a lot of people were saying it was, and they were pushing back). Note how the 2006 BTC pipeline route (Baku-Azerbaijan-Turkey) was chosen to bypass Russia? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia... After that, there were the two competing pipeline deals in Syria, c. 2009-2010. One was a Russia-Iran deal, one was a Qatar-Saudi-USA deal. In 2010, Assad took the Russia-Iran offer, and in 2011, Obama's government OKed a CIA destabilization-and-regime change program in Syria. If Syria had taken the other offer, I doubt that would have happened. This Ukraine war is just more of the same (plus, a new Cold War is good for military procurement budgets). Of course, energy geopolitics isn't the only issue, but anyone who has read Steve Coll's "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power", or Daniel Yergin's "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" will recognize it's often the central reason for international conflicts. As far as the clearly reprehensible human rights record of Putin being the reason for the conflict, that's laughable - just look at Mohammed bin "Bone Saw" Salman in Saudi Arabia, or the Yemen war. Now if MBS pulled out of Wall Street and ended the Saudi roll in petrodollar recycling, then we'd be hearing about the need for regime change. And if Putin and Assad had signed up for the petrodollar program, they'd be lauded as democratic reformers, and the Ukraine invasion would portrayed in the US media as a necessary action to dismantle neo-Nazi militias (see Yemen, again).

Sakos 4y ago

I was curious about exact numbers and found this in the most recent EU report: https://imgur.com/a/HIkyO05 https://imgur.com/a/HIkyO05

stefan_ 4y ago

LNG was never going to be competitive with pipeline gas, no one was in some "fight" over US or Russia selling to EU. But there sure is a long, long history of Russia using its gas supplies to blackmail and manipulate ex-USSR and other states, including using it's old puppet governments in Ukraine to literally disarm it. Their coercion extended to bombing pipelines, too, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_energy_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_en... Finally, the price of LNG is so high as to be thoroughly uninteresting for bulk uses like heating. That means it is rapidly being displaced by other methods like heat pumps. The future isn't "LNG from the US", it's "no gas" and current events have very much turbocharged that transformation.

marcinzm 4y ago

The US (in 2021) used 827 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year and produced 934. The amount it's expected to send to Europe (45 billion cubic meters) amounts to under 5% of its own production which has been increasing every year. Most of that hasn't even been sent yet so the percentage up to now is even smaller. So yeah this was never about the US selling natural gas to Europe.

photochemsyn 4y ago
You have to add on the 34 bcms to the 45 bcms for a total of 79 billion cubic meters expected to be exported to Europe in 2022. Prices in Europe for gas seem to be about 10X higher than in the USA. Costs of LNG export are also higher, but I imagine the profit return on those European sales is about as large as their total profit on all domestic USA sales (and note domestic prices have doubled as well). This is pretty basic supply and demand stuff. It's hard not to conclude that a major US goal was cutting Europe off from Russian gas, and replacing that with American LNG. You can find all sorts of quotes to this effect from the US government before 2022: > (March 2021) "‘President Biden has been very clear, he believes the pipeline is a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States,’ Blinken says in Brussels" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/secretary-of-state-blinken-warns-europe-against-russias-nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-11616602442 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/secretary-of-state-blinken... So, if Europe's not going to get gas from Russia, who does that leave? Perhaps the glut of fracked American gas, provided in LNG tankers, instead? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/business/energy-environment/natural-gas-shale-chevron.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/business/energy-environme... (Sep 2021) "Natural Gas Boom Fizzles as a U.S. Glut Sinks Profits: Chevron’s multibillion-dollar write-down of gas assets is the most recent sign that the gas supply has far outstripped demand." These dots are not that hard to connect.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  >You have to add on the 34 bcms to the 45 bcms for a total of 79 billion cubic meters expected to be exported to Europe in 2022. The 34 was already being exported so it's sort of disingenuous to add it in terms of supply/demand impact. >Costs of LNG export are also higher, but I imagine the profit return on those European sales is about as large as their total profit on all domestic USA sales (and note domestic prices have doubled as well). Now you're making assumptions. >So, if Europe's not going to get gas from Russia, who does that leave? Transitioning to clean energy, nuclear, etc. >These dots are not that hard to connect. Thank you for finally not beating around the bush on what your actual point and angle are.

ed_balls 4y ago

"With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines" They are not destroyed. There are 4 pipes in total and 1 pipe of NS2 is intact. Most likely Russia destroyed the other pipes to get NS2 working (you want gas? Need to certify NS2 and we won't pay contract penalties, because this is not our fault) Resources blackmail didn't work, hence nuclear threats and mobilisation.

ed_balls 4y ago
Source for the downvoters https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/single-line-nord-stream-2-can-still-export-gas-analysts-say-2022-09-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/single-line-nord-str...

pcrh 4y ago

Is the difference in price between Europe and the US down to shipping costs?

nyokodo 4y ago
To transport Nat Gas you have to cool it down to -265F thereby reducing its volume 600X to transport economically as a liquid (LNG), then it needs to be safely turned back into a gas at its destination. That is expensive relative to pipeline fed Nat Gas.

andsoitis 4y ago

> Mission accomplished? What is the mission?