Skybird
04-04-22, 04:09 PM
The German Minister of Economics and Climate Change, Habeck, is currently selling the Germans that he has concluded an energy partnership with Qatar by means of which liquefied gas and soon hydrogen will reach Germany by ship. The terminals still have to be built, and the Qataris, who are in long-term contracts with Asia, first have to create new supply capacities that cannot be created at present, and the years-long approval procedures in Germany, and the German botched results in major construction projects (Berlin Airport sends its regards... ) are also an inconvenient truth - but this does not bother the Greens, who still stubbornly refuse to even talk about extending the lifetime of the last German nuclear power plants, let alone acknowledge that Europe cannot do without nuclear power, since "anti-nuclear" has been the core of the Greens' brand for half a century.
That also the plans for a mass spreading of heat pumps in shortest time must fail at the practical feasibility, uneconomically high, extreme installation costs and to 85-95% for it not at all suitable building existence, an insurmountable lack of qualified craftsmen and a just as massive lack of raw materials and primary products, he also ignores completely - just like the enormous increase of electricity demand for the operation of this heating revolution and the material and personnel shortage, which also slows down the development of renewable energy.
So anyone tempted to see the new world saviors in the Green flagship ministers Habeck and Baerbock should be warned. While they are still verbally arming themselves against Russia and cutting a fine figure on the sound wave front, they are already preparing the next domestic cascade failure of German government policy and ideologically charged planned economy. It may turn out that after the obvious failure of German foreign-policy wishful thinking and Merkel's Russia policy, the Greens are actually able to add to this gigantic total failure, since this deliberate madness is now treading on soon-to-be double-digit inflation rates, state-sinking debt levels, and an unimagined competition for the alternatives to Russian energy and raw-material supplies, since it has long been a question not only of natural gas as an energy source, but also of the resources from Russia on which the chemical and agricultural industries depend.
Thus the appearance is created that one would really want to go an alternative way, on which now everything would become well, but this appearance is just illusory, and at the end of this way lies according to my present estimate the successful slaying of the ideological arch enemy of the green-left clientele, to which it belongs nevertheless in parts: the nasty burgouisen "Bürgerttum" and its privately owned livelihoods, which Leftiness applies to replace with fancy salon socialism. Because to bring this down, at any price, is the actual driving core of the left-green striving and working. And at the hilyariously high price of the special German "energy turnaround" that the whole world is laughing at, it will probably succeed in the end with considerable probability.
After 1945 is before 1925.
------------------------------------------------------
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:
Natural gas from Qatar for Europe: Waterloo in the desert sand
In view of the war in Ukraine, Europe is counting on Qatari gas to make it independent of Russia. But a visit to the small emirate on the Gulf shows: Hopes are built on sand.
There is hardly a more dreary place than the extreme north of Qatar. You drive along empty highways bathed in glistening light through landscapes that look as if they were created with a bulldozer. Apart from power lines and dry bushes, there is nothing but wasteland. A few small houses stand on the coast, thrown down like cardboard boxes, blown about by dust and sand. Abandoned motorboats float like dead fish in the shallow water.
Of all places, Europe's hopes now rest on this desert on the Persian Gulf. The Europeans, who want to become independent of Moscow as quickly as possible as a result of the war in Ukraine, are desperately looking for alternatives to Russian natural gas. They could find what they are looking for in Qatar. After all, the small Gulf state has the third-largest gas reserves in the world. Here, in the sea off the dust-dry coast, lies South Pars / North Dome, the largest gas field in the world, which Qatar shares with its neighbor Iran.
Saad al-Kaabi, the energy minister of the small Gulf monarchy, however, puts a heavy damper on the great expectations. Even if they wanted to, they would unfortunately not be able to deliver large quantities of gas to Europe, says the country's top gas seller at a policy conference in the capital Doha: "Most of our capacities are tied up in long-term contracts in Asia. Unfortunately, that doesn't allow us to divert larger volumes to Europe in the short term."
The Europeans are currently making the rounds. A few days ago, al-Kaabi met with Swiss Finance Minister Ueli Maurer. Later, German Economics Minister Robert Habeck visited and then jubilantly announced that Germany had agreed to a gas partnership with Qatar. Al-Kaabi, however, quickly brings the Germans' expectations down to earth: nothing at all has been agreed, he tells journalists, experts and industry representatives who are actually waiting for good news. "We merely agreed to resume the discussions of the last four years to see how we can possibly work together."
The desperate Europeans are thus experiencing their energy policy Waterloo. "Now we finally realize where we've gotten ourselves into," says Johann Killinger. The head of the energy company Hanseatic Energy Hub has also made the pilgrimage to Doha. There, he takes a hard line with his home country's policy: "Even without the war in Ukraine, it is economically unreasonable to rely on just one supplier for what is currently the most important energy source," he says, shaking his head. "I just don't understand it."
Indeed, Germany in particular buys almost all its gas from Russia, which is pumped into the country through pipelines. Qatar, on the other hand, is considered one of the largest exporters of liquefied natural gas. As early as the end of the 1990s, the emirate, which had run into difficulties due to the falling price of oil, fully embraced the new technology, in which the volatile raw material is converted into liquid at minus 164 degrees Celsius and can then be transported by tanker.
In the middle of the desert, the Qataris have therefore built Ras Laffan, the world's largest liquefied natural gas processing plant. Here, gas can be converted into 90,000 barrels of liquid every day. There is also an artificial port - also the largest in the world - from which up to a thousand tankers leave the shallow sea off the emirate every year. "The Qataris thus helped create the world market for gas," Killinger says. "Because it's liquefied natural gas that makes it possible to get the raw material to customers flexibly, independent of pipelines."
Qatar has become correspondingly rich with it. In Doha, you can feel it everywhere. The city looks like a spaceship in the desert, with skyscrapers, highways and luxury hotels. For the upcoming World Cup, the government has once again dug deep into its pockets and had stadiums, hotels and a metro built to show the world in which league their country is now playing. The Qataris are proud of the fact that their dwarf state can conduct world politics thanks to gas.
At the same time, however, the emirate wants to keep all options open. Doha has verbally sided with the West in the Ukraine war. But the country is not participating in the sanctions against Moscow. And business relations with Russia, where Qatar's sovereign wealth fund has a 19 percent stake in the Rosneft Group, also continue. The Qataris are obviously convinced that they need more than one friend - and are aligning their foreign policy accordingly.
The emirate had to experience firsthand in 2017 what happens when you suddenly have no friends, when it was boycotted by all its neighbors for political reasons. At the time, the other Gulf states had accused Qatar of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations throughout the region.
Qatar's brash foreign policy was a thorn in the side of powerful Saudi Arabia in particular, which is why Riyadh wanted to bring its tiny neighbor to its knees with a blockade. But Qatar did not let the blockade get it down and got through the difficult times with Turkish and Iranian help. "The blockade has changed Qatar," says Doha-based political analyst Nader Kabbani. "It has made the country more independent - and also more self-confident."
That self-confidence is being felt by Europeans. Officials in the emirate, for example, repeatedly let it be known what they think of European energy policy: "It's all very well to talk about the energy turnaround and to focus on sustainability in the future. But we shouldn't forget that until then, we need gas as a bridging technology," says Energy Minister al-Kaabi. In Asia, he says, we work with state-owned companies and can plan for the long term. "In Europe, on the other hand, we're dealing with various private buyers who mostly do short-term business."
The Qataris therefore believe that Europe will not be able to break away from Russian gas in the near future. European experts also know that independence from Moscow is an illusion. "We have not invested enough in infrastructure and have let the sector deteriorate," grumbles Patrick Pouyanné, the head of the French group Total, during his visit to Doha. He says Europe needs to wake up and finally adopt a realistic energy policy.
But even then, it will take years to meet Europe's gas needs without Russian supplies. "There is still no terminal for liquefied natural gas in Germany," says Johann Killinger, who has been pushing for the construction of such a plant in Stade near Hamburg for years. Just until the permits are issued, another year will pass, he adds. Only then could construction begin.
So the Europeans in particular will probably have no choice but to continue to rely on Russian natural gas. "It's not like you can replace gas that quickly," Killinger says. "You may be able to turn down the heat in the homes. But the economy will still rely on the fuel."
Doha, the glittering capital of Qatar, is therefore not a place of hope for Europeans at the moment, but of lost illusions. "I hope we learn from this for the future," Killinger says. At least the Qataris, who will at least increase their capacities in the future, seem to believe so. As night falls, red lettering lights up above the Sheraton Hotel. It reads: Everything will be alright.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (http://www.DeepL.com/Translator) (free version)
That also the plans for a mass spreading of heat pumps in shortest time must fail at the practical feasibility, uneconomically high, extreme installation costs and to 85-95% for it not at all suitable building existence, an insurmountable lack of qualified craftsmen and a just as massive lack of raw materials and primary products, he also ignores completely - just like the enormous increase of electricity demand for the operation of this heating revolution and the material and personnel shortage, which also slows down the development of renewable energy.
So anyone tempted to see the new world saviors in the Green flagship ministers Habeck and Baerbock should be warned. While they are still verbally arming themselves against Russia and cutting a fine figure on the sound wave front, they are already preparing the next domestic cascade failure of German government policy and ideologically charged planned economy. It may turn out that after the obvious failure of German foreign-policy wishful thinking and Merkel's Russia policy, the Greens are actually able to add to this gigantic total failure, since this deliberate madness is now treading on soon-to-be double-digit inflation rates, state-sinking debt levels, and an unimagined competition for the alternatives to Russian energy and raw-material supplies, since it has long been a question not only of natural gas as an energy source, but also of the resources from Russia on which the chemical and agricultural industries depend.
Thus the appearance is created that one would really want to go an alternative way, on which now everything would become well, but this appearance is just illusory, and at the end of this way lies according to my present estimate the successful slaying of the ideological arch enemy of the green-left clientele, to which it belongs nevertheless in parts: the nasty burgouisen "Bürgerttum" and its privately owned livelihoods, which Leftiness applies to replace with fancy salon socialism. Because to bring this down, at any price, is the actual driving core of the left-green striving and working. And at the hilyariously high price of the special German "energy turnaround" that the whole world is laughing at, it will probably succeed in the end with considerable probability.
After 1945 is before 1925.
------------------------------------------------------
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:
Natural gas from Qatar for Europe: Waterloo in the desert sand
In view of the war in Ukraine, Europe is counting on Qatari gas to make it independent of Russia. But a visit to the small emirate on the Gulf shows: Hopes are built on sand.
There is hardly a more dreary place than the extreme north of Qatar. You drive along empty highways bathed in glistening light through landscapes that look as if they were created with a bulldozer. Apart from power lines and dry bushes, there is nothing but wasteland. A few small houses stand on the coast, thrown down like cardboard boxes, blown about by dust and sand. Abandoned motorboats float like dead fish in the shallow water.
Of all places, Europe's hopes now rest on this desert on the Persian Gulf. The Europeans, who want to become independent of Moscow as quickly as possible as a result of the war in Ukraine, are desperately looking for alternatives to Russian natural gas. They could find what they are looking for in Qatar. After all, the small Gulf state has the third-largest gas reserves in the world. Here, in the sea off the dust-dry coast, lies South Pars / North Dome, the largest gas field in the world, which Qatar shares with its neighbor Iran.
Saad al-Kaabi, the energy minister of the small Gulf monarchy, however, puts a heavy damper on the great expectations. Even if they wanted to, they would unfortunately not be able to deliver large quantities of gas to Europe, says the country's top gas seller at a policy conference in the capital Doha: "Most of our capacities are tied up in long-term contracts in Asia. Unfortunately, that doesn't allow us to divert larger volumes to Europe in the short term."
The Europeans are currently making the rounds. A few days ago, al-Kaabi met with Swiss Finance Minister Ueli Maurer. Later, German Economics Minister Robert Habeck visited and then jubilantly announced that Germany had agreed to a gas partnership with Qatar. Al-Kaabi, however, quickly brings the Germans' expectations down to earth: nothing at all has been agreed, he tells journalists, experts and industry representatives who are actually waiting for good news. "We merely agreed to resume the discussions of the last four years to see how we can possibly work together."
The desperate Europeans are thus experiencing their energy policy Waterloo. "Now we finally realize where we've gotten ourselves into," says Johann Killinger. The head of the energy company Hanseatic Energy Hub has also made the pilgrimage to Doha. There, he takes a hard line with his home country's policy: "Even without the war in Ukraine, it is economically unreasonable to rely on just one supplier for what is currently the most important energy source," he says, shaking his head. "I just don't understand it."
Indeed, Germany in particular buys almost all its gas from Russia, which is pumped into the country through pipelines. Qatar, on the other hand, is considered one of the largest exporters of liquefied natural gas. As early as the end of the 1990s, the emirate, which had run into difficulties due to the falling price of oil, fully embraced the new technology, in which the volatile raw material is converted into liquid at minus 164 degrees Celsius and can then be transported by tanker.
In the middle of the desert, the Qataris have therefore built Ras Laffan, the world's largest liquefied natural gas processing plant. Here, gas can be converted into 90,000 barrels of liquid every day. There is also an artificial port - also the largest in the world - from which up to a thousand tankers leave the shallow sea off the emirate every year. "The Qataris thus helped create the world market for gas," Killinger says. "Because it's liquefied natural gas that makes it possible to get the raw material to customers flexibly, independent of pipelines."
Qatar has become correspondingly rich with it. In Doha, you can feel it everywhere. The city looks like a spaceship in the desert, with skyscrapers, highways and luxury hotels. For the upcoming World Cup, the government has once again dug deep into its pockets and had stadiums, hotels and a metro built to show the world in which league their country is now playing. The Qataris are proud of the fact that their dwarf state can conduct world politics thanks to gas.
At the same time, however, the emirate wants to keep all options open. Doha has verbally sided with the West in the Ukraine war. But the country is not participating in the sanctions against Moscow. And business relations with Russia, where Qatar's sovereign wealth fund has a 19 percent stake in the Rosneft Group, also continue. The Qataris are obviously convinced that they need more than one friend - and are aligning their foreign policy accordingly.
The emirate had to experience firsthand in 2017 what happens when you suddenly have no friends, when it was boycotted by all its neighbors for political reasons. At the time, the other Gulf states had accused Qatar of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations throughout the region.
Qatar's brash foreign policy was a thorn in the side of powerful Saudi Arabia in particular, which is why Riyadh wanted to bring its tiny neighbor to its knees with a blockade. But Qatar did not let the blockade get it down and got through the difficult times with Turkish and Iranian help. "The blockade has changed Qatar," says Doha-based political analyst Nader Kabbani. "It has made the country more independent - and also more self-confident."
That self-confidence is being felt by Europeans. Officials in the emirate, for example, repeatedly let it be known what they think of European energy policy: "It's all very well to talk about the energy turnaround and to focus on sustainability in the future. But we shouldn't forget that until then, we need gas as a bridging technology," says Energy Minister al-Kaabi. In Asia, he says, we work with state-owned companies and can plan for the long term. "In Europe, on the other hand, we're dealing with various private buyers who mostly do short-term business."
The Qataris therefore believe that Europe will not be able to break away from Russian gas in the near future. European experts also know that independence from Moscow is an illusion. "We have not invested enough in infrastructure and have let the sector deteriorate," grumbles Patrick Pouyanné, the head of the French group Total, during his visit to Doha. He says Europe needs to wake up and finally adopt a realistic energy policy.
But even then, it will take years to meet Europe's gas needs without Russian supplies. "There is still no terminal for liquefied natural gas in Germany," says Johann Killinger, who has been pushing for the construction of such a plant in Stade near Hamburg for years. Just until the permits are issued, another year will pass, he adds. Only then could construction begin.
So the Europeans in particular will probably have no choice but to continue to rely on Russian natural gas. "It's not like you can replace gas that quickly," Killinger says. "You may be able to turn down the heat in the homes. But the economy will still rely on the fuel."
Doha, the glittering capital of Qatar, is therefore not a place of hope for Europeans at the moment, but of lost illusions. "I hope we learn from this for the future," Killinger says. At least the Qataris, who will at least increase their capacities in the future, seem to believe so. As night falls, red lettering lights up above the Sheraton Hotel. It reads: Everything will be alright.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (http://www.DeepL.com/Translator) (free version)