In late March, after two years of withering attacks on Ukraine, Russia knocked out half of Ukraine’s power supply. Up to that point, Russia’s missiles and kamikaze drones had mostly targeted the Ukrainian substations that push electricity from power plants to consumers. But this time they hit the plants themselves, severely damaging and destroying hydroelectric and fossil fuel stations — all of which are difficult to repair or replace.
When power stops, life grinds to a halt. Lights go out. Sewage treatment stops. Clean water stops. Electric cars, buses and trolleys stop. Elevators stop, trapping older and disabled people. For many, home heating, refrigeration, cooking and clothes washing stops, along with medical devices such as oxygen generators.… Seguir leyendo »
Last month, we visited a Hezbollah tunnel on the Israeli-Lebanese border as part of a bipartisan group of Middle East experts. Dug almost a football field deep—with twisting staircases, advanced lighting, and oxygen cables—the tunnel’s sole purpose was to deliver Hezbollah terrorists from the Lebanese side of the border deep into Israeli territory. Equally menacing was the sight of active Hezbollah outposts less than 100 yards from the discovered tunnel, where the organization conducts intelligence and stores rockets ready to strike deep into Israel in the event of a conflict. The visit underscored that the Israeli-Lebanese border remains at a boil, and developments over the last few months have pushed the two sides closer to conflict than at any time since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.… Seguir leyendo »
Griegos, egipcios, palestinos e israelíes no suelen coincidir en nada, excepto tal vez el hummus. Por eso, cuando se ponen de acuerdo en otras cuestiones, hay que tomarse en serio lo que piensan. En 2020, sus dirigencias dejaron a un lado viejas afrentas y modernos resquemores y acordaron la construcción de un nuevo gasoducto para el transporte de gas natural desde yacimientos recién descubiertos en el Mediterráneo hasta Europa.
Esos griegos, egipcios, palestinos e israelíes fueron prescientes. No sabían que los precios se iban a cuadruplicar, o que Vladímir Putin convertiría el gas ruso en un arma bélica y comercial. Por desgracia, apenas el presidente estadounidense Joe Biden ingresó a la Casa Blanca en 2021, envió emisarios a suprimir los planes, sobre la base de una argumentación medioambiental incierta.… Seguir leyendo »
For the first time in over four years, a Ukrainian president is coming to the White House.
On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will meet with his American counterpart. They’re likely to cover a variety of issues: the state of relations with Russia; Ukraine’s fight against corruption; and the challenges of the pandemic. After thanking President Biden for America’s continued support and assistance, the Ukrainian leader may gently inquire about NATO membership.
It should be a good meeting. But there will be a large elephant in the room: Nord Stream 2. Beloved of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the natural gas pipeline threatens the security of Europe — and Ukraine especially.… Seguir leyendo »
After the imprisonment this month of the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, punishing Russia is back on the agenda. On Monday, European Union foreign ministers agreed to impose sanctions on Russian officials, with the final details to come.
Yet such measures are unlikely to satisfy the Kremlin’s critics. They have in their sights a pet project of President Vladimir Putin’s: Nord Stream 2, a pipeline under the Baltic Sea that would supply natural gas directly to Germany.
The project has already survived fierce opposition from many European countries and the United States. And Germany, for which the pipeline is part of Europe’s delicate geopolitical balancing act, is committed to finishing it.… Seguir leyendo »
Durante el año pasado, las predicciones sobre las pugnas serias que iría a enfrentar el presidente ruso Vladimir Putin, o incluso sobre su muerte política, se tornaron cada vez más frecuentes. Un artículo reciente en The Economist titulado “An awful week for Vladimir Putin”, es sólo un ejemplo de lo antedicho. Sin embargo, es la evaluación de Steven Lee Myers, quien es biógrafo de Putin y corresponsal del New York Times, la que resuena como la más certera, él dijo en repetidas ocasiones: “Putin siempre gana”.
Tal vez la palabra “siempre” no es del todo cierta. Se espera que la economía de Rusia crezca sólo un 1% este año, debido a la rezagada diversificación de las exportaciones, la fuga a gran escala de capitales y los bajos niveles de inversión extranjera directa vinculados a las sanciones occidentales impuestas tras la anexión de Crimea por parte de Rusia en el año 2014.… Seguir leyendo »
Traversant la mer Baltique, le gazoduc Nord Stream 2 reliera les villes de Ust-Luga en Russie et Greifswald en Allemagne. Ses deux pipelines franchiront les eaux de la Russie, de la Finlande, de la Suède, du Danemark et de l’Allemagne sur une distance de 1 200 km pour livrer à l’Europe occidentale 55 milliards de mètres cubes du gaz chaque année. Mais pour les ministres et les diplomates, l’envergure du projet est aussi grande que le nombre de controverses qu’il engendre.
Alors que le sort du gazoduc était incertain encore le 30 octobre, sa réalisation désormais paraît inévitable depuis que le Danemark a donné son feu vert à Nord Stream 2 AG, le consortium responsable de la construction du gazoduc et dirigé par Gazprom, pour poser les derniers 147 km de tuyaux dans les eaux territoriales danoises, au sud-est de l’île de Bornholm.… Seguir leyendo »
En la última reunión celebrada entre Angela Merkel y Vladímir Putin, los líderes conversaron sobre Siria y Ucrania Oriental, aunque también figuraba como punto destacado en la agenda el tema Nord Stream 2. Un consorcio formado por Gazprom y varias empresas de Alemania, Holanda y Francia tiene previsto tender bajo el mar Báltico un segundo gasoducto entre Rusia y Alemania, que se sumará al ya existente. El proyecto ha tropezado con la firme oposición de Ucrania, que no está dispuesta a perder sus derechos de tránsito sobre el gas procedente de Rusia. Al igual que Donald Trump, Polonia y los países bálticos critican el proyecto porque temen que podría generar una dependencia excesiva del gas ruso por parte de la UE.… Seguir leyendo »
While living in Calgary, the headquarters of Canada’s oil and gas industry, I occasionally heard people in the business say their pipelines were cursed. The country was brimming with oil and gas, and yet battles over proposed pipelines had limited the ability of producers to get those resources to market.
The story of the latest controversy, an expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, took a significant turn on Tuesday when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced it would nationalize it. The government’s purchase of Trans Mountain from the Houston-based energy infrastructure company Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion in Canadian dollars underscores just how difficult it has become to build fossil fuel projects, at least in wealthy, democratic countries, long thought to pose fewer political and social risks than developing countries.… Seguir leyendo »
The Southern Gas Corridor, a $45 billion dollar pipeline project delivering gas from Azerbaijan to Europe via Turkey, is supposed to start operations by 2020.
But Azerbaijan’s ability to uphold its financial commitments towards the project is under serious pressure from continued low oil prices. The drop in the price of oil was initially treated as temporary by Azerbaijani officials, but has already had a devastating impact on most sectors of the country’s economy, exacerbated by the state’s mismanagement of funds.
Baku has only secured $1.4 billion of the at least $4 billion needed for the Trans-Anatolian pipeline (TANAP), the first part of the route, and needs to secure an additional $2-3 billion for the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) which brings the gas to Europe.… Seguir leyendo »
The Papua New Guinea liquefied natural gas (LNG) project is the largest resource extraction project in the Asia-Pacific region. Constructed at a stated cost of US$19 billion, it’s operated by ExxonMobil in joint venture with Oil Search and four other partners.
The project extracts natural gas from the Papua New Guinea highlands where it is processed before being sent via some 700km of pipeline to a plant near the nation’s capital, Port Moresby. The gas is then liquefied and transferred into ships for sale offshore.
Construction for the project began in 2010, and the first gas shipment was made in May 2014.… Seguir leyendo »
As President Vladimir Putin seeks to reinforce Russia’s position as a global power through nuclear saber-rattling and military campaigns in Ukraine and Syria, the next U.S. administration will need to both contain and cooperate with him. If played right, that may get easier in the years to come. The reason: The transformation of the world’s natural gas markets is weakening Moscow’s economic toolkit. And that will make Putin’s pipeline politics — his use of natural resources for foreign policy purposes — obsolete.
It’s clear that Russia will try to make a last stand to hold on to its natural gas market in Europe.… Seguir leyendo »
From early on in the fight over Keystone XL, environmental activists have argued that mining Canadian tar sands (and moving that oil to market through a massive transcontinental pipeline) would be “game over” for the climate. As a result, part of the discussion about the pipeline’s impact has been about whether and how much approving this one single project would add – or not – to the entirety of planet-heating emissions being blown into the atmosphere.
But despite the time and lobbying money and words that have been spent on it, Keystone XL isn’t all that special, necessarily. It’s not just this one construction project that could doom us to a much hotter and more uncomfortable future: we’ve already discovered more oil than we can possibly use and still keep the climate in any sort of humanly tolerable shape.… Seguir leyendo »
Después de asumir, a regañadientes, la idea del corredor mediterráneo ferroviario, el Gobierno de España ha ido Bruselas a defender el corredor mediterráneo del gas. “El Sur –dijo Mariano Rajoy el jueves en la capital comunitaria- con sus abundantes reservas de gas (en Argelia y Libia) puede contribuir a la superación de la dependencia de gas del Este. Pero para eso es necesario impulsar las infraestructuras de conexión entre la Península Ibérica y el resto de Europa“. Los alemanes parece que le han escuchado con atención. Eso dicen las crónicas.
La principal y más urgente de las infraestructuras de conexión a las que se refería Mariano Rajoy en el Consejo Europeo es el gasoducto que entra en la península por Almería y recorre todo el litoral mediterráneo en dirección a Francia, provinente de Argelia.… Seguir leyendo »
The Mekong River runs more than 4,000 kilometers, from China into Myanmar and then through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, where it empties into the sea. Traditionally a major transport route and food source, it is also increasingly becoming a supply of energy — at its own peril and at the cost of instability among states in the region.
Several large dams already straddle the Mekong in China, and construction on more dams downstream is underway. Hydropower is a well-established source of renewable energy, and the countries of the lower Mekong see it as an attractive way to help meet their exploding energy demand while diversifying their energy portfolio.… Seguir leyendo »
For Israel, the discovery in 2010 of a vast natural gas field off its coast was like hitting the jackpot. The future energy development offered the country unprecedented economic security.
Now, the business plans for the Leviathan site are advanced enough that Israel and its neighbors must address the toughest question about the project: how to export the gas.
The Leviathan field’s estimated 510 billion cubic meters of gas, coupled with continuing production at the nearby Tamar site, are expected to fuel Israel’s electricity generation, water desalinization and a new generation of energy-intensive industries. Exporting the gas beyond Israel would offer still greater economic benefits.… Seguir leyendo »
For 21 years builders in this country have been legally bound to construct homes that conserve energy. The building regulations tell them how much insulation they must use, what kind of windows they must fit and how good their draught-proofing will be. Guess how many builders have been prosecuted in that period for non-compliance. I won't keep you in suspense: the answer is none.
There should be only one good reason for this: that they are building houses so well that enforcement is unnecessary. But a study conducted by the Building Research Establishment, looking at just one factor (the rate at which cold air leaks in) found that 43% of the new houses it checked should have been failed by the inspectors.… Seguir leyendo »
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