Quick Response?

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Well the news is coming in thick and fast. The EU Observer informs us this morning that:

The EU might build a new gas pipeline on the Adriatic Sea coast in order to ease reliance on Russia following the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute. Hungarian economics minister Janos Koka told news wires about the plan following a meeting of EU energy experts in Brussels on Wednesday (4 December). Under the scheme, tankers would deliver liquid gas from the Middle East and North Africa to an Adriatic region entry point into Europe. A feasibility study is due by March. The EU experts’ meeting was orginally tabled for May, but was brought forward after Russia turned off gas supplies to transit state Ukraine on Sunday causing sharp drops in deliveries to the EU.

I think all this takes us back to the strategic importance of EuroMed.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

2 thoughts on “Quick Response?”

  1. I think all this takes us back to the strategic importance of EuroMed.

    Why? It is a port facility. It can take gas from anywhere. If we were out for the North African gas, we’d better build pipelines. The wisdom of building it on the Adriatic is probably that the member states most dependant on Russian gas (Slovakia, Hungary) are closest to that.

    If we take this issue seriously we have to build several facilities, as there’s a small chance of truely cataclysmic accidents. The amount of energy stored in an LNG tanker dwarfs a nuclear weapon. I am not sure how you would mix it with enough air, but with enough hostile intent, somebody might find a way.

    But, how is this addressing the core of the problem? Russia has 25% of the world’s reserves and it has considerable influence on the central asian supply. The only nice place that has much gas to spare is Canada. That gas will stay in North America if there’s a serious shortage. The Middle East is a very bad idea. Do we really want to wed our gas supply to the place that will in the long run control the oil supply?
    It seems to me that we need to foremost target energy consumption and the principal energy carriers.

  2. What is the betting that if an Adriatic pipeline is in the offing Mr Barosso’s one time holiday host and the co-employer of his cheif political advisor Dusan Sidjanski, Mr Latsis will be a major shareholder?

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