Gas from Norway Could Reduce Dependency on Russia

Western Europe’s dependence on Russia’s natural gas reserves has been a constant source of worry. A new facility being built in Norway to liquify the precious energy source could provide some relief from Russian dependency.

…It is estimated that one-fourth of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves lie hidden away in the Arctic. Some of them lie beneath the ocean floor, in the Barents Sea. At the end of this year, the Norwegian energy concern Statoil wants to begin extracting natural gas in the area.

Getting the resource from the ice desert to central Europe by pipeline would be too expensive. Pipelines more than 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) long aren’t worth the cost, and the Barents Sea is simply too far away. That’s why Europe’s first major facility for the liquification of natural gas is now being built on the island off the port of Hammerfest. Once the natural gas has been liquified, it can be shipped all over the world by sea.

The production of so-called “liquified natural gas” (LNG) — a clear, colorless, non-toxic liquid — is becoming increasingly important in the energy business. LNG already accounts for a quarter of the global natural gas trade. Qatar, the country in the Persian Gulf that has the world’s third-largest reserves, is investing massively in liquification technology, and Algeria, Indonesia and Malaysia are fast following suit. The entire market is expected to grow by about 8 percent a year until 2025 — much faster growth than is expected from the pipeline business.

Until recently, Western European countries like Germany paid little attention to the trend. But ever since the Russian-Ukrainian dispute over natural gas prices in early 2006 and the more recent rift between Russian gas monopoly Gazprom and Belarus, concern has been growing in Berlin that Germany’s dependence on Siberian natural gas reserves has become too great. Now LNG shipments could become one of the most important alternative sources of natural gas.

Spiegel (Germany)