Russian Plans To Move Ahead On Second Gas Pipeline To China

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

My usual preamble about oil & gas pipelines ... I am generally in favor of increasing oil & gas pipeline infrastructure anywhere in the world, regardless of the politics or countries involved.

Pipelines are generally the best and safest way to reliably transport hydrocarbons over long distances.

LNG can be shipped between continents by ship, and that is a totally separate discussion.

U.S. is dead set against Nord Stream 2, but I think that it is a good expansion of the global oil & gas pipeline infrastructure.  

Yes, I know Trump dislikes Nord Stream 2, because he wants to sell U.S. LNG to EU.  But I disagree.  

My question is: why not offer Nord Stream 2 and also offer LNG as an option to end users.  Competition is good.

Anyway, I am in favor of Russia building another gas pipeline to China.  Because expansion of oil and gas infrastucture is good, in the bigger picture.

 

Russian Plans To Move Ahead On Second Gas Pipeline To China

Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom says it has launched feasibility studies for the construction of a second gas pipeline to China that would more than double the volumes it could deliver there.

Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller said on May 18 that a Power of Siberia 2 pipeline might carry up to 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year to energy-hungry China.

The pipeline might pass through Mongolia, Miller said, without mentioning a potential date for construction.

Russia has been looking for years to diversify its export markets away from Europe to the Asia-Pacific region, particularly China.

A number of European states have meanwhile taken a hard look at their own energy dependence on Russia, particularly with political fallout from Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 complicating the West's relations with Moscow.

In December 2019, Gazprom started pumping gas to northeastern China via its 2,000-kilometer-plus Power of Siberia pipeline in eastern Siberia.  ...

 

[Tomasz + 1,608]

Its said that construction of Power Siberia 2 will be much cheaper than construction of first pipeline to China.

The sense of construction of the first gas pipeline was also the gasification of the Far East of Russia, which is essentially deprived of this type of infrastructure, which is the main reason for its poor development despite the fact that living conditions are supposedly not bad there and there is a possibility of trade with China, South Korea or Japan.

Second pipeline is to  be led through a much easier area, and generally the Russians immediately preferred this western pipeline focused only on exports, but the Chinese needed gas in the eastern China.

At the same time, let me point out that if Power Siberia 2 is created, Europe and China will compete for gas from the same source. And Russian gas resources in Western Siberia, however, are not inexhaustible about what Tom Kirkman some time ago and the issue of price competition for gas consumers may appear for some time.

Currently, Europe is looking at grwing volumes of cheap Russian gas with disgust and in a decade or two it may turn out that as part of moving away from coal it will desperately need this cheap gas and here it turns out that there is no additional gas for Europe because it is for China with which Russia has better relations with in addition that at least in last decade natural gas generally was more expensive in Asia than in Europe.