El aprovisionamiento de gas ruso a Alemania a partir de los gasoductos "Nord Stream" (uno en funcionamiento y otro en construcción) posiblemente genere un clivaje estratégico en la ya bastante desunida Unión Europea. Por un lado están los beneficiarios: Alemania, Austria y, en menor medida, Francia. Por el otro, la Europa central antirrusa liderada por Polonia. así lo cuenta el analista William Engdahl en su sitio web (http://www.williamengdahl.com):
Título: The Fatal
Flaw in Washington’s New Energy Strategy
Texto: If the
feeling of pity would be worth a damn one would be tempted to feel sorry for
the hapless Poles. Now Poland’s leaders have again been seduced, this time by a
dangerous Washington stratagem: to try to become the Natural Gas Hub of the EU
displacing Germany and pushing Russia out.
The Poles seem to
have a penchant to fall for self-destructive projects. That was the case in
1939 when the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck signed with Britain and later
France the Polish-British Common Defense Pact believing that Britain would
defend Poland’s sovereignty in the event of a Nazi invasion only to find itself
divided as spoils of war by Hitler and Stalin while Britain and France stood by
quietly smiling. They had another agenda from the Poles.
It was also the
case when the Polish people, especially Lech Walesa, believed the Reagan CIA
and National Endowment for Democracy. Solidarno??, with millions in CIA and
State Department money via the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA
NGO-front, took Poland from the frying pan of Soviet control to the fire of
George Soros and his Harvard Boys with their free market hyperinflation and
looting of the nation’s most valuable assets. The “national DNA” if we can
speak of such, seems to lack one or more vital amino acids that cause them to
distort true perception of who their friends and who their enemies are.
Now, during the
recent “red carpet” reception of US President Trump in Warsaw, the Poles fell
all over themselves to embrace the US President and to believe his promises to
make Poland a rival to Russian natural gas for the EU. In his July 6 remarks to
the meeting of the Three Seas Initiative in Warsaw Trump told the leaders present
that they should take US energy exports as an alternative to dependence on
Russian gas.
The Three Seas
Initiative is a loose effort of 12 Central and East European nations to
coordinate energy policies among others. Trump told his Polish audience,
clearly referring to Russia, “Let me be clear about one crucial point. The
United States will never use energy to coerce your nations, and we cannot allow
others to do so. You don’t want to have a monopoly or a monopolistic
situation.” He then went on to state “We are committed to securing your access
to alternate sources of energy, so Poland and its neighbors are never again
held hostage to a single supplier of energy.”
LNG Energy Hub?
Trump’s stop in
Warsaw on route to the Hamburg G20 summit was calculated to feed Polish dreams
of US backing to block the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline under the
Baltic Sea from Ust Luga south of St. Petersburg to Greifswald, Germany midway
between Berlin and Hamburg and 80 km from the Polish border. The Poles are
furious that they lose not only the transit fees from Gazprom for a Polish
pipeline from Ukraine. They also want to push Russia’s Gazprom out of the huge
and growing EU gas energy market. This is precisely the Trump Administration
long-term agenda. In his meetings with the Polish government Trump reportedly
spoke about LNG gas infrastructure and the enormous possibilities to import US
LNG from its surplus of shale gas.
US shale gas sent
by special tankers from the very limited number of LNG terminals existing in
the USA East Coast and Gulf of Mexico doesn’t come cheap.
This June the
first US shipment of LNG came to Poland from Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass
plant in Louisiana. And it didn’t come cheap. Energy consultants estimate the
price at the Polish LNG terminal in Swinoujscie to be $5.97 per million British
thermal units. The same gas in the US market today goes for around $3 per
million Btu. Estimates are that Russian gas to Germany costs about $5 per MBtu.
The Poles are getting suckered because of their Russophobia and manipulation by
Washington.
A NATO Energy
Strategy
The Polish
strategy has been a long time in the making, and supported by the US and the
Atlantic Council. Already in 2014 Poland began construction on its liquefied
natural gas (LNG) terminal, in the Baltic port of Swinoujscie at a cost of
nearly $1 billion. It can accept 5 billion cubic metres of gas per year, and is
discussing doubling that. But that’s only the first part of what in fact is a
NATO strategy to drive Russian gas out of EU markets.
The strategy
calls for making Poland a natural gas hub for Central Europe via linking of
Poland with Lithuania, Ukraine, Slovakia and the Czech Republic through
interconnectors.
It’s part of
what’s called the Three Seas Initiative, founded last year by Poland and
Croatia to link energy strategies among the twelve countries bordering the
Adriatic, the Baltic and the Black Sea. Croatia’s government is also trying to
construct a controversial floating LNG terminal on the island of Krk in the
Adria amid major opposition in the popular Croatian tourist region of Istria.
In addition to Poland and Croatia the initiative includes Hungary, Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia and
Austria, almost all of whom are presently relying on Russian natural gas.
Atlantic Council,
the Washington-based think tank de facto of NATO strategy, is the public driver
of the Three Seas Initiative to try to push Russian gas out from the former
communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Ironically, Germany and
other Western EU countries back the Gazprom Nord Stream II already in
construction, putting them in conflict with Poland’s Three Seas Initiative.
In May the
Atlantic Council held a conference in Washington on the Three Seas strategy.
Former Obama National Security Director, General James Jones gave a keynote
speech in which he pushed the strategic importance for the Trump Administration
to back the Three Seas Initiative on energy “independence” from Russian gas. In
his remarks Jones stated that the purpose of the Initiative is to reduce or
eliminate the “Kremlin’s strong hand” in the European energy sector. Trump’s
July 6 speech to the Three Seas Initiative in Warsaw could have been written,
and maybe it was, by General Jones himself. Strategic geopolitical Washington
policies are not penned by Presidents, at least not since the CIA assassination
of JFK in November 1963. Making Poland an energy hub along with Croatia for
import of very expensive US LNG natural gas is Washington geopolitical strategy
against Russia.
New EU Fault
Lines
In addition to
taking aim at Russia energy influence in the eastern and central European EU
states, the Trump policy on LNG gas to Poland and potentially Croatia is aimed
at hitting the dominant influence of Germany and France over EU affairs. The
latest US Senate economic sanctions against Russia take direct aim at the
companies involved in backing the German-Russian Nord Stream II pipeline
expansion across the Baltic independent of Poland transit. If passed by the
House of Representatives and signed by Trump, it would impose severe economic
sanctions on EU companies involved in energy projects with Russia, such as Nord
Stream II.
The governments
of Germany and Austria immediately registered vehement opposition to the latest
possible US sanctions for obvious reasons. On June 15 the German and Austrian
foreign ministers issued an unusually US-critical joint statement. It declared
in very strong terms, “Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe, not the
United States of America. We cannot accept …?the threat of illegal
extraterritorial sanctions against European companies that participate in the
development of European energy supply.” Austria boycotted the Trump July 6
appearance before the Three Seas Initiative.
What is
developing are new major EU fault lines around the economic lifeline of energy,
explicitly of natural gas energy. On the one side is the axis between
especially Germany but also Austria, France and other EU states currently tied
to major Russian gas supplies. Now emerges clearly the opposed axis of Poland
allied with Washington. How this plays out in the next months and years will
have major implications for war and peace not only in Europe.
Washington’s New
‘Gas Great Game’
One feature of
the Washington Deep State is that their strategic imagination is limited to
what seemed to work for them a century or so ago until recently, namely control
of energy. In the past several years, in addition to countless Pentagon wars
for control of oil such as the 2003 occupation of Iraq and the destruction of
Libya in 2011, the US-steered war against Bashar al-Assad until today, is
fundamentally a war for control of energy, specifically natural gas energy.
If we view the
often confusing Trump Administration policy aims through the special prism of
global domination of natural gas and strategic denial of same for other rivals,
a clear strategy is now visible. One key cornerstone of the Trump strategy is
the attempt to make Poland a European hub for US shale gas via support of the
Three Seas Initiative.
A second
cornerstone of the new Washington strategy is to sabotage an emerging
Qatar-Iran-Syria-Turkey natural gas alliance to bring the world’s largest
natural gas reserves in the shared gas field in the Persian Gulf straddling
both Iranian and Qatari territorial waters.
That sabotage was
launched between Saudi Arabia and Washington during Trump’s recent visit to
Riyadh where among other issues Trump encouraged a Saudi-led Sunni “Arab NATO.”
The result was the bizarre Saudi-led sanctions against Qatar for ties to Iran
and support of Muslim Brotherhood terrorism. Bizarre because as most of the
observant world knows, Saudi Arabia today is the world’s leading sponsor and
financier of terrorism along with Washington and has been since at least the
support for Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda Mujahideen in Afghanistan after
1979. Until recently when they realized winning the war in Syria was hopeless,
Qatar had its hands dirty with aid to terrorists in Syria. That was then
apparently. In reality the Qatar blockade by the Saudis is aimed not at
stopping radical terrorists. It is aimed at keeping Iranian and Qatari and
potentially Syrian gas out of the EU gas market, potentially the world’s
largest gas consumer in coming years.
Then add to these
two key elements of US gas war the recent attempt to seduce China into becoming
reliant on US shale gas imports. One outcome of the April meeting at Mar-a-Lago
between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping was the announcement that the US
Commerce Department will support and facilitate export of US shale gas in the
form of LNG to China. China presently is a major importer of natural gas from
Qatar and is about to become a significant Russia gas importer when the large
Power of Siberia gas pipeline to China begins operation in 2019. Washington is
playing on China’s understandable wish to have several different gas suppliers
for China’s strategy of dramatically lessening coal power reliance.
The Fatal Flaw
There is a fatal
flaw in the new Washington gas wars geopolitical strategy. Despite the fact
that there are another 12 LNG ports under construction along the US East Coast
and Gulf of Mexico, the reliability of USA shale gas supplies over the long
term is highly dubious.
Much has been
written about the enormous environmental damage from hydraulic ‘fracking’
required to seismically induce liberation of the shale gas from low
permeability shale rock formations. The list includes a high demand for
freshwater, up to 10 million gallons per well. It includes production of large
amounts of highly toxic waste water, of induced seismicity–earthquakes, of
greenhouse gas emissions, and groundwater contamination.
To bypass these
issues which in many states violate clean Water Act laws, Scott Pruitt, the
Trump head of the Environmental Protection Administration responsible for
enforcing the Clean Water Act has indicated he favors lifting many
environmental restrictions on shale gas fracking to boost gas production. That
would mean huge water needs across the USA from Pennsylvania to Texas to North
Dakota. It would also mean a quantum jump in toxic groundwater pollution
The most serious
fatal flaw however on the Trump USA shale export domination plan is the
stability of shale gas production itself. Because of the geology of
unconventional shale gas, the well production has a relatively high beginning
flow rate. However, as repeated tests have shown, shale gas wells experience a
hyperbolic decline in volume after about 4-5 years. tests indicate that gas
volume can decline by some 80% after 7-8 years. This means that perhaps 80% of
the profit of a shale well comes only in the first 5-7 years before dropping
dramatically. This means that to continue the levels of gas output far more
wells must be drilled at a far higher cost in terms of gas price to the end
users as well as costs to the environment.
Until now shale
gas drillers have focused on what are called “sweet spots” such as the West
Texas Permian Basin where large volumes of gas can generate large profits. The
glut in domestic US shale gas is being relieved by a recent law allowing gas
and oil export for the first time since the energy crisis of the 1970’s.
However in recent months alarming signs of a kind of present-state “peak” in
shale gas at current levels of investment are emerging.
According to the
June 16th issue of the energy industry newsletter, OilPrice.com, shale oil
production in the very active Texas Permian Basin may already be in decline.
That means shale gas will soon follow. OilPrice.com in their subscriber report
states, “The Permian Basin has also seen productivity run into a brick wall,
with new-well production per rig having declined every month so far this year.
The extraordinary productivity increases came to a halt in 2016. Back in August
2016, the average rig could produce just over 700 barrels of oil per day from a
new well. That figure has dropped to an estimated 602 barrels per day for July
2017. Falling productivity suggests that the sweetest spots have been taken up,
and that if the industry wants to produce more, it will have to spend more and
drill in marginal areas.”
This is the fatal
flaw which everyone is ignoring, especially Poland in the US shale gas
seduction.
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