Gas storage in Germany hits record lows as Russia halts fertilizer shipments and European continent reels from high heating costs
By jdheyes // 2022-05-06
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A few years back, then-President Donald Trump highlighted the stupidity of continuing to fund NATO as a bulwark against Russia when one of the alliance's founding members, Germany, was pursuing a natural gas deal with Moscow. “It is very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia, where we’re supposed to be guarding against Russia, and Germany goes and pays out billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia. We’re protecting Germany, we’re protecting France, we’re protecting all of these countries,” Trump said in 2018. Because Joe Biden's handlers are Marxist socialists who want to tear down what remains of our founding republic, they instructed him to reverse Trump's decision a year later to sanction the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project because of Moscow's ongoing 'gray zone' warfare against the U.S. and our NATO allies. Now, after Europe has spent years foolishly dismantling its fossil fuel infrastructure in deference to iffy, unreliable and expensive "green energy" and became overly reliant on Russia and other potential enemies, Moscow is turning the screws on its European customers even while President Vladimir Putin makes a natural gas pitch to another NATO and U.S. rival, China. According to Strange Sounds, natural gas stocks in Germany are at historic lows, while at the same time Russia has cut off exports of much-needed fertilizers for food production -- all while Putin has stationed some 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border after spending years making his economy "sanctions-proof": Germany has begun searching for alternative gas suppliers in the event that imports from Russia are interrupted due to tensions in Ukraine. Fossil gas covers more than 25% of Germany’s energy consumption, all of which is imported cheaply by pipeline from Norway and Russia. But as tensions mount in Ukraine, politicians in Berlin are getting anxious. In a near total reversal of the German position, Berlin is now looking at importing liquified natural gas (LNG) from the US, Qatar and other potential suppliers. Exactly what Trump predicted is exactly what is happening now. The Biden regime has made Qatar, the world's leading producer of natural gas, a non-NATO partner in hopes of securing more supplies for Germany and Europe in general; why Biden doesn't rely instead on U.S. natural gas producers, who created surplus capacity under Trump, is another question. Robert Habeck, the German vice-chancellor and minister for the economy and climate protection, told the German parliament late last month that though the U.S. funds most of NATO and has protected Europe for decades, American liquified natural gas would not be given priority or preference. “We will now address this question vigorously,” he pledged, pushing back on fracked U.S. LNG. “Where the LNG comes from will also be market-driven. We should buy where the LNG is cheapest.” His remarks came after Gazprom, the state-owned Russian gas company, announced how low European and German gas stocks had become. “On January 11, 2022, the amounts of reserves in European UGS Underground gas storage facilities hit all-time lows in the long history of observation,” said a tweet from the company. “UGS facilities in Germany and France are 37% and 36% full." Meanwhile, Reuters reported that Putin arrived for the Winter Olympics in Beijing with a new Russian LNG deal for President Xi Jinping. Some analysts have observed that Putin's stance with NATO and the West over Ukraine appears unusually bold, even for him. But according to The New York Times, all of the moves he is making are due to years of planning, including insulating the Russian economy from sanctions that are sure to follow any invasion of Ukraine -- from making new gas deals with China to protecting Russian infrastructure: Russian economic officials “are pretty proud, and have good reasons to be, for the work they have done to make the Russian economy more immune to sanctions,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. This transformation, among the most dramatic examples of what is known as “sanctions-proofing” worldwide, comes less than eight years after Western sanctions over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 mired Russia in economic and political upheaval. Trump foresaw all of this occurring, which is why the anti-American deep state stole his reelection. Sources include: StrangeSounds.org Reuters.com NYTimes.com
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