Problems with laying the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline, which were already substantial enough, became even more acute as soon as Denmark held its first public consultation on its potential construction. More than three hundred residents and official representatives of the Danish municipalities through whose area the gas pipeline should pass took part in the consultation. […]
Oil and Gas
The Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) project and the related Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TGP), which have been in the process of implementation since 2011 have again become the subject of discussion in energy and political circles, in which this is connected to the latest intensification of the gas conflict between Ukraine and Russia and a growing […]
Despite the ending of the winter peak in fuel consumption in European countries, the situation with gas supplies to Europe via Ukraine remains acute; this is apparent not merely in the fact that from 26 February to 1 March there was a real threat of Ukrainian gas reserves falling below 8 billion cubic metres (bcm), […]
The theme of Europe’s energy security is a constant irritant in both EU–Russia relations and in relations among European elites. We should probably resign ourselves to the manipulative nature of discussions about European energy security, which are far from the real economic circumstances. With this manipulation in mind, we should focus on economic reality, which […]
One of the key questions for securing Europe’s energy security is the possibility of organising the transportation of Iranian gas to the EU and thus alleviating the EU’s dependence on gas supplies from Russia. In the last year and a half this question has acquired a key and apparently disproportionate significance for Europe’s energy security. […]
Poland and Denmark have announced their decision to bring the Baltic Pipeline into operation in 2022. This troubled project, which has already been delayed twice since work began on it 16 years ago, should, according to its architects, supply the Poles and other European consumers with a significant volume of gas extracted in Norway. The […]
However much Kiev may try to disown everything that in any way – even metaphorically – gives Ukraine the brutal charm of its powerful neighbour Russia, there are certain things that President Poroshenko’s team are unable to hide. One of these is the catastrophe that is the country’s gas transportation system, whose condition European energy […]
This August President Trump signed a new package of sanctions against Russia, which had been approved by both houses of the US Congress. There had been no doubt that Trump would sign the document making the sanctions mandatory, otherwise accusations of his connections with Russia would escalate. One of the most important components of the […]
Last year, not too long ago, some independent experts called the construction of the Baltic Pipe trunk gas pipeline (TGP) from Norway to Poland via Denmark a very ambitious project for the North Europe region. Precisely a year ago potential participants in the project started another round of the Baltic Pipeline discussions, the third in […]
In the early stages of global economic turmoil, the Russian oil and gas industry misjudged the true scale of coming trouble on hydrocarbon markets. The turmoil appears to have been regarded as a classic over-production crisis and generally seen as a healthy shakeup for the system, which would help deflate the dangerously expanding bubble of […]
Talk in Europe about the steady growth of alternative energy and the potentially vanishing demand for Russian natural gas would appear to derive more from political than from economic considerations. The desire to make Vladimir Putin suffer for his aggressive stance on Ukraine and Syria by stopping energy imports from Siberia – effectively an indirect […]