Russia Is Slowly Turning The NatGas Tap Off To Europe

14 Comments on "Russia Is Slowly Turning The NatGas Tap Off To Europe"

Arthur on Mon, 24th Mar 2014 11:35 pm 



Excellent news. Let 500 million Europeans, dominant in most fields of economy and technology, seriously contemplate how much longer it will let define it’s foreign policy by a former colony of 180 million Europeans, dominated by a few million Zionists. Time to end the kosher Fed currency, IMF, NATO, Wallstreet and reinvent European Civilization in both Europe and America from the ground up under inclusion of Russia. And it will be Germany that will (be forced to) break with the status quo.

J-Gav on Mon, 24th Mar 2014 11:53 pm 



What goes around, comes around, eh?

Davey on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 12:37 am 



Arthur I would say Europe is dominent in food, pretty women, and wonderful landscape that is where it ends!

alokin on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 2:06 am 



4% is not that much, given it is spring, but I could be wrong.

Makati1 on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 2:26 am 



With US NG at least 3 years and many billions away, there is no out for Europe this time. Fraking will not save them in time. Nor will the threat of more sanctions. Putin is more than a match for ALL of the Western leaders put together. Especially when the banksters lose their hold on the Russian economy by causing the dollar to be avoided in international trade. China is also on their side, and India is warming up to the Russian view. At least, that is hoe I see it today.

PapaSmurf on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 2:30 am 



Russia needs the EU just as much as the EU needs Russian Nat Gas.

It is fictional to think that Russia could shut off the gas for any extended period of time. Russia would quickly run into it’s own cash crunch because Gazprom loses money on their domestic subsidized sales. The only way for the company (and Russia) to function is to have a steady inflow of western Euros.

GregT on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 3:51 am 



http://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/petrodollar-alert-putin-prepares-to-announce-holy-grail-gas-deal-with-china

ulenspiegel on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 9:36 am 



The hope is that the Russian leadership is not that braindead as some of the commentators in this thread. 🙂

Hint: only an complete idiot would gradually shut down the NG supply in spring after an extremely warm winter in central Europe.

The Russian have only a chance to hit Europe by reducing the supply in winter dramatically, i.e. forcing the transfer of NG for industrial usage into the heating sector. Everything else is waste of strategic options.

Arthur on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 10:10 am 



Arthur I would say Europe is dominent in food, pretty women, and wonderful landscape that is where it ends!

Davey, you are still in the Tranquility Base, July 20, 1969 (peak USA) mode of thinking. The world has moved on considerably over the past 45 years.

EU-US p***ing contest:

True, the US is still dominant in the realm of media (Hollywood, Google), weapons/MIC, finance, standard software (Microsoft, Oracle), bulk food, food chains (McDonalds). But the rest?

– Europa launches more than 50% of all commercial satellites, leaving the rest to Russia, US, China
– Airbus has been dominating Boeing for the past 15 years
– Europa has a fast rail network
– US car industry lost global competition after Lehman crash
– Europe dominates with all things concerning renewable energy: wind (Vestas, Siemens), solar, smart grids, storage. Yes, it are cheap Chinese hands producing all these solar panels, but most if not all turn key solar panel factories come from Germany [youtube ihEIaYsB4yg]
– Everybody heard of Silicon Valley, the supposedly Mecca of high-tech, where all these Asian and Indian hands, working for Intel and AMD, are operating mouses to use CAD software to design new chips. This CAD software and more important the wafer steppers to produce the chips, the real high-tech, comes from my home town in Holland [wiki ASML]. ASML machines produces 90+% of all the chips on this planet, including those in phone and tablets ‘made by Apple and Samsung’.
– The US exported it’s industry to Asia and as a consequence has huge trade deficits, where Europe runs trade surpluses. That situation was enabled by the position of the dollar as a globalized reserve currency. The whole world knows that by now and is working towards ending that situation.

Rule of thumb number one on this planet ever since 1492: the political entity with the most Europeans in a single tax farm is on top. That’s why the US managed to take over from divided Europe after 1945. But now Europe is back under a single currency and integrated market and more or less politically organized (Paris-Berlin) and will take over the baton from the US in the near future and restore pre-1939 dominance, not just on the economical and technological level like is already the case, but also on the political level. Not because Americans are stupid, they are not, but for demographic reasons. Numbers. More than 50% of those below 5 in the US are ‘of color’. That’s good news for the national basketball league and chances to regularly win the 100-200m Olympic sprint, but not for the prospects of the US continuing to be a dominant sophisticated high-tech nation like it was in 1969.

The US got itself into planetary pole position after 1945, because it was a) Zionist run and b) because of that fact allied itself to the USSR, the latter doing the real heavy lifting in destroying the European ‘mother civilization’. It is unlikely that in the future the US will find in Russia or China a willing partner to repeat that stunt. The US kosher dominated bankster regime has exposed it’s true intentions too obvious for all the elites in the world to see and are (not so) secretly conspiring to pull the rug from under Wallstreet backed AIPAC Washington. It is unlikely (but not entirely impossible) that Germany will let itself maneuver in a full blown trade war with Russia over a non-issue like the Crimea and be so foolish to self-implement a Morgentau-plan 2.0 of radical German de-industrialization because it has no energy to run an economy. Paris-Berlin-Moscow (750 million) is next and if Euro-America is lucky, it can escape AIPAC-Washington/USSR 2.0 and become a Constitutionalist independent Euro-American 1776-1913-like rump state that can join European civilization, as a junior partner. Sorry for being so blunt, but that’s how I think it is going to be played out in the future.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 10:48 am 



Arthur, a long winded response like you just made is nothing more than an example of a propagandist ideologue. You are suffering cognitive dissonance with the reality of a Europe in a death spiral. You could write a book on the dominance of the European or American economic, cultural, and ideological position in the world and you better include Asia. Then you would need to ask is the dominance a curse and has it ruined the world. Yes it has and we all are to blame and none of us. This just a natural progression of a self-organizing system. Would we be better to have followed the subsistence direction of the Kogi of Columbia? They call us the little brother and they are the “Big Brother” trying to save mother earth from our infantile ways. Europe was the initiator of the great fall from grace from the beginning. “ALL” the foul and nasty ideas originated in Europe. America as nothing more than an extension of Europe perfecting and accelerating this fall after Europe engage and destroyed itself in two world wars. Now it is Asia nailing the coffin shut with its wholesale adoption of western lifestyles and unsustainable economics. I will not even address you spiel on the tools of our destruction from your Europe and my America. I should say my Europe too because my 25 year old daughter has spent her whole life in Madrid which I visited twice a year for 18 years.

Makati1 on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 12:47 pm 



ulen… do you really think that NG is not used for things other than heating? How about chemical feed stocks? Electric production? Manufacturing? Etc.

The EU has no alternatives to Russian gas except to go on the open market and bid against China, Japan, and many other gas users. Good luck with that. Most EU countries are in bankruptcy just as is the uS. A little pain is going to make the Europeans think a bit more about their blood ties with the Empire. Serious sanctions could be the last straw that breaks the Western financial back.

rockman on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 12:57 pm 



Ulenspiegel – I agree it would be painful for Russia to lose that cash flow for an extended period of time. But that’s the advantage of carrying a “concealed weapon”: just the knowledge that Russia is so “armed” is powerful. In fact, even if you aren’t carrying it can be advantageous to have others believe you are armed.

So a theoretical for you: come this September Russia announces a major maintenance effort in the pipeline system delivering NG to the EU. As a result they simply say there will be a “significant reduction in deliveries to Germany”. That’s all they say: no exact time when it will start, no details on volumes or length of reduction. And they do this at the opening bell of the German stock market. So how many tens of $billions (if not hundreds of $billions) of equity would be lost within a couple of days? I know: can’t put a number to it. But wouldn’t you guess the loss would be huge. And maybe after the many German stocks crash some Russians buy them on the cheap. And then guess what: in a few days the Russians say they’ve decided to delay the maintenance program for some “unknown time”.

So the Russians never reduce their deliveries. Except, of course, for what German industries have to cut back on due to the economic hit their stock market took. OTOH Russia just signed a long term NG sales contract with the UK…first time ever. So perhaps what cash flow Russia might lose from Germany they could make up with new sales to the UK.

Have you ever played poker and won a hand even though you had losing cards but were able to bluff the other players into giving up? In 40 years I’ve done this in my business with service companies, landowners and other companies are numerous occasions. In fact I’m about to get a $30,000 price reduction from a drilling contractor that thinks I have other options competing with his bid. I don’t. As we say in Texas it’s all about horse trading. And then Russians have a rather large stable to work with while the EU is often on foot. In my case it’s not personal… just business. But I think some countries are trying to make it personal with Putin. And he strikes me as guy who doesn’t respond well to such actions.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 1:10 pm 



Rock, Germany and Russia are so interconnected economically that such a scenario will cripple Russia as much as Germany and they both know it. You can’t decouple the two in a short time either. A trade war with Germany and Russia is suicide. All this talk about Russian integration with China will take years and it is just talk. Sure they have been naturally integrating for years. It is a good match just like Canada and the US. Let us see this unfold in a new normal of a contracting financial system and global instability. I imagine this storm will blow over in a while and things will reset to an uneasy status quo out of mutual self-preservation. If you rock the global system now it will crack. No pun intended Rock on the reference to rock.

J-Gav on Tue, 25th Mar 2014 5:56 pm 



They are far from turning the European tap off (€€€!), though they may turn it down as they deem it politically expedient…