Russia Loses More By Relying On China, India LNG Markets

The New Voice of Ukraine in its August 7, 2022 issue has ridiculed Russian President Vladimir Putin for thinking that he can replace Europe’s market with China and other Asian markets, arguing that pipelines for natural gas across vast territories are becoming obsolete and construction costs are zooming.

Photo Insert: Russians won’t be able to raise the hundreds of billions needed to build pipeline or LNG projects to link the Arctic and Siberian gas and oil fields to Asia, it noted.

LNG is the future of energy, relatively clean and powerful. Its popularity and portability by ship to anywhere in the world cheaply is growing exponentially, but Russia, with more gas than any nation on earth, has missed the boat and remains far behind in developing this technology.

Putin cannot catch up because Western expertise and capital and the companies that Putin has relied on to build the Russian oil and gas industry have fled in protest over the war.

Russians won’t be able to raise the hundreds of billions needed to build pipeline or LNG projects to link the Arctic and Siberian gas and oil fields to Asia, it noted. The United States, Australia, and Qatar dominate the production and distribution of LNG.

Their plants and terminals and fleets cost billions but deliver huge volumes gas safely with a minimum of emissions.

The process consists of cooling gas to minus 162 degrees Celsius, which shrinks the gas’s volume by 600 times into a non-toxic liquid that is easy to store and transport.

One LNG ship, more than three football fields long and carrying five cryogenic tanks, delivers the equivalent of three days’ gas flow from Russia’s biggest gas European pipeline.

They criss-cross the oceans constantly. Germany is building several LNG terminals and the rest of Europe dozens more. Russian oil and coal is banned by law and gas boycotts are in the works.

Germany is burning its own coal again, and nuclear facilities in France and Germany are being brought out of mothballs or enlarged.

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