MIDLEVART (Denmark) (AFP) – Not far from a muddy trench, large stacked black pipes will soon be buried in this land in Denmark. After a long pause, construction of a gas pipeline connecting Norway and Poland resumed after the Russian attack on Ukraine.
From LNG terminal projects in northern Germany, Finland or France, to potential new routes through Spain or the eastern Mediterranean, Europe is making efforts to free itself of Russian gas, although the task will take years, experts say.
In Middelvart on the Danish island of Funen, work on the Baltic Pipeline resumed last month to complete this nearly 900-kilometre line.
“It’s also about having gas in the Danish system, but above all with the help of the gas system of our good neighbors and our Polish friends,” Soren Jules Larsen, project manager at Energenet, the Danish operator of energy infrastructure, told AFP.
Barely a week into the war in Ukraine, the Danish Environment Agency – which was particularly concerned about the project’s impact on native species of mice and bats – granted permission to continue construction nine months after it was suspended.
“We were expecting it to be approved soon, but the war certainly made the issue more urgent,” said Trini Philomsen Berlining, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
The project, which partially passes under the sea, was born about twenty years ago and began its implementation in 2018. It is supposed to start operating in October before being ready for work in early January 2023.
“We have really good cooperation with all contractors to speed up and do everything we can to stick to the schedule,” Jules Larsen said during a visit to the site.
Abandoning Nord Stream 2
The gas pipeline, with an annual capacity of 10 billion cubic meters of gas, is supposed to supply half of Poland’s consumption, which three years ago announced the termination of its extensive contract with Russia’s giant Gazprom in 2022. But this good news for Warsaw could complicate supplies for the rest of Europe.
Norway, the second largest gas supplier in Europe after Russia, is already producing at full capacity, so gas arriving in Poland will no longer be sold in Western Europe.
“This project would help Poland, but it could lead to a decrease in Norwegian gas exports to the UK and Germany,” said Zhongqiang Luo, an expert at Rystad Consulting.
At the same time, many long-term contracts between Russia and European suppliers are still valid for 10 to 15 years, he said.
But the executive authority in the European Union confirms that the bloc can completely dispense with Russian gas “before 2030.”
With Norway’s top speed, declining fields in the Netherlands and Britain, and the desire to dispense with Russia, Europe is seeking to obtain its gas from further regions by bringing in transportable LNG from the United States, Qatar or Africa.
But importing it requires building large plants, or at least buying floating storage units and converting imported LNG into natural gas.
alternative methods
Faced with the abandonment of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia that resumed last winter in Danish waters, Germany quickly relaunched three projects to install LNG plants, which had not been a priority before. One of them could be ready in the winter of 2024. /2023 and the other two in 2026 at the earliest.
Finland and Estonia announced on Thursday a project to lease a ship-port to import gas, while the three Baltic countries said they had stopped importing Russian gas as of early April.
In southern Europe, Spain and Portugal are scrambling for an alternative supply of Russian gas. The port of Sens, the largest port in Portugal, intends to double the capacity of its gas estuary in less than two years.
Spain, which is linked to a gas pipeline with Algeria and has large terminals to receive liquefied natural gas, may be an option. But this requires hard work to improve the network with the rest of the European Union, across France.
Another route was also relaunched, linking Europe to gas in the eastern Mediterranean, which was discovered in large quantities twenty years ago off the coasts of Israel and Cyprus.
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