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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

> I do understand that less nuclear means more coal and that this is a difficult decision.

Germany has vast financial resources at its disposal. They could go on a natural gas plant building binge and link deals to the US on imports for long durations that the US would be thrilled to do. That would help narrow the trade deficit Germany has with the US ($65 billion annually; natural gas trade could solidly knock out half of that), so killing two birds with one stone. With help from the US abundance of natural gas supply, Germany could replace half its coal power in the next ~15 years using natural gas and significantly reduce its CO2 output just from that (and a big chunk of the other half could probably be knocked out by gradual renewable growth from where they're already at).

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Interesting, I wasn't thinking about US gas.

When talking about gas we're always looking at Russia, and the current geopolitical situation makes this very unattractive.

Can those amounts of gas realistically be shipped to Europe?

I'd say it's more a matter of those amounts of gas will be shipped to Europe. Right now it doesn't appear anything can stop it (unless Russia wants to dramatically drop the average price of natural gas in Europe to stop it).

The US is about to become the world's energy kingpin, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia in both oil and gas; that vast supply will be pushed outward:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/iea-sees-...

The average price of natural gas in Europe tends to be around $6, typically twice that of the US market. Once you add in the total cost of LNG (processing, transport, etc.), you get to a cost closer to $7.x to $8.x right now (that will come down with volume in the next few years, as the US is building several big new LNG terminals on the Atlantic and the Marcellus shale gas supply in the mid Atlantic is growing rapidly).

That's also before we get to technological innovation, which the US energy industry has always been renowned for, and has done wonders for the US shale industry the last decade (dramatically lowering costs, enabling the industry to survive the oil plunge and rapidly rebound, etc., entirely thwarting OPEC expectations of crushing the industry).

>Can those amounts of gas realistically be shipped to Europe?

Wait, isn't that why we're funding Al-Nusra and all manners of terrorists in Syria and overthrowing the Ukrainian government? To stop it from happening.

There were two pivotal events during EuroMaidan protests.

1. Beating of the students on 30th of November. Before that the protests were small and getting smaller.

2. Use of lethal force against protesters which lead to a lot of supporters abandoning Yanukovych making it possible to vote against him in parliament with 328/450 votes.

If both of those are acts of "overthrowing government" then US could control it on such a level, that overthrowing is just plain unnecessary.

I mean if we don't look at the global context and zoom deep into the micro day by day chronological narrative level, I'm sure we can say all overthrows are inevitable.

We can say that the Shah delivering a royal decree to dismiss Mossadegh makes the Iranian coup logically inevitable rather than looking at the CIA astroturfing for BP hegemony.

We can say that Torrijos's death is logical because he stepped in a plane at the wrong time rather than looking at the US reverting Jimmy Carter's deal to restore the Panama Canal control back to Panama

The last time this was suggested on the news (CNN, etc), I did some quick math.

To ship gas to Europe, the US will need to spend about 50B-100B+ (minimum) building LNG facilities on both port sides, and then build something like 10,000 LNG Carriers (oceanic ships) to meet demand. Which would cost another 100B+ (maybe even 1T).

After all the infrastructure is set up, the prices will be at least 2-3 what they pay now (as they have to do things to and with the LNG that Russia does not in the process of delivery).

Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.

These were back of the envelope calculations. It could be a factor of 10 off in either direction.

How were those numbers estimated? To go with adventured's proposal that Germany replace half of its coal power with LNG, Germany generated 284 TWh from coal in 2013. Producing 142 TWh from gas would require about 25 million tons per annum of gas (assuming 490 g CO2/kWh from gas generation in CCGT, per IPCC 2014, and working backward from CO2 to CH4 -- 178 kg of methane per MWh).

The US is already expected to add 66 MTPA of LNG export capacity by 2019:

http://analysis.petchem-update.com/supply-chain-logistics/us...

Were you perhaps estimating the numbers to replace all of Europe's thermal coal consumption?

I thought so. A pipe sounds much cheaper than boats.

> Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.

Oh, if that's possible, sure, thank you very much! ;-)

Why couldn't you build a submarine pipeline, instead of the ship terminals and ships?

Langeled (1166 km) and Nord Stream (1222 km) transport gas under the sea, and a US-to-Germany pipeline would only be about 5 times that distance. I estimate Boston-to-Hamburg could be done for $60 billion, and it could make stops in Newfoundland, Ireland, and Britain.

Oh, if that's possible, sure, thank you very much! ;-)

That worked for German defence policy, so there's precedent...

How do you get the gas to Europe? LNG tankers? Too expensive. If they want gas, they'd have to buy it from Russia, and they don't want to buy from Russia.

Yeah the US would hate this. We already have a huge dependence on gas. All comes from Russia.

Why would "the US" hate this? American gas exporters and producers would be happy to have steady long-term buyers. Environmentalists dislike fracking, but I think they'd be neutral to mildly supportive for gas projects that are clearly aimed at reducing coal use. A lot of Americans would be happy about cutting the US trade deficit.

I'll admit that domestic gas consumers wouldn't like this plan any more than they like other plans to increase foreign gas demand, raising domestic prices, but it's not clear that the faction benefitting from low domestic gas prices is more influential than the collective of the groups mentioned above.

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