RE: The US should not intervene in Ukraine!
April 11, 2014 at 2:16 am
(This post was last modified: April 11, 2014 at 2:31 am by Anomalocaris.)
Gas is not oil. Gas weigh twice as much as oil for equivalent amount of energy, is highly volatile and vastly more ignitable, and needs to be shipped under high pressure. I don't think you've ever dealt in natural gas industry if you think natural gas can be safely or economically handled in industrial volumes using container sizes tanks moving existing rail and marine container infrastructure.
Moving high volumes of natural gas by rail is a nonstarter. Russians have proposed precisely this idea to the Chinese to leverage existing rail infrastructure in the two countries to avoid the initial startup cost of building pipelines to china. The economic analysis in 2008 when gas price was 4 times as high as they are now was so negative the Chinese accused the Russians of bad faith and broke off the negotiation and decided to do without Russian gas. And this did not involve a maritime stage.
So it seem fair to say Russians can jack up gas price 400% and the Europeans would still find it cheaper to buy Russian gas coming in pipelines than American gas in container sized shipping tanks.
Moving high volumes of natural gas by rail is a nonstarter. Russians have proposed precisely this idea to the Chinese to leverage existing rail infrastructure in the two countries to avoid the initial startup cost of building pipelines to china. The economic analysis in 2008 when gas price was 4 times as high as they are now was so negative the Chinese accused the Russians of bad faith and broke off the negotiation and decided to do without Russian gas. And this did not involve a maritime stage.
So it seem fair to say Russians can jack up gas price 400% and the Europeans would still find it cheaper to buy Russian gas coming in pipelines than American gas in container sized shipping tanks.
