The week in energy: Pipeline diplomacy

The week in energy: Pipeline diplomacy:

"The history of gas pipelines in Europe shows energy realpolitik at its most pragmatic. Ideology and alliances may be important, but providing heat and light is something else again, and it has generally been the practical imperatives of energy supply and demand that have dictated policy. In 1968 Austria became the first western European country to buy gas from the Soviet Union, starting off with very small volumes but then ramping up quickly in the 1970s. From 1974 Italy, Germany and France followed suit.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the imposition of martial law in Poland, Cold War tensions escalated, and the increasingly close energy ties between Russia and western Europe became an urgent concern for the US. When the Soviet Union sought to build a large new pipeline to the west from the Urengoy gasfield in northern Siberia, financed by European banks and using European suppliers, the Reagan administration imposed sanctions to try to stop it, seeing the project as a critical source of export earnings for the USSR. European leaders held firm, however, and the sanctions were dropped. The pipeline entered service with a ceremony in France in 1984. There have been reports since that an explosion on a Russian pipeline in 1982 was the result of US sabotage.

Tensions over the Nord Stream 2 project, which would double the volume of gas that can be delivered from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, have been less dramatic. But last weekend Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil chief executive now US secretary of state, said the US opposed the project, arguing that the planned pipeline undermines Europe’s energy security and stability, and would give Russia “yet another tool to politicise energy.” That position aligns the US with Poland, which is worried about the way that the pipeline enables Russia to bypass it for gas deliveries. The first Nord Stream pipeline, which entered service in 2011, was compared by a previous Polish defence minister to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that partitioned Poland between Hitler and Stalin. Poland’s views on the expansion of the connection as Nord Stream 2 have been expressed in more measured language, but are as strong as ever."



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