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Comment by radicalbyte | Hacker News Reader

> American fracked LNG exporters who hoped to simply seize that market from Russia are doubtless disappointed.

Germany has a huge industry which won't be able to switch away from gas that easily so I'm sure that the LNG suppliers will have a market for the next 20 years.

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In 2021, Germany got 55% of its gas from Russia (the rest from other European countries). Depending on how much overall consumption can be reduced, European suppliers might be able to cover most/all of it.

European suppliers will also be busy covering all the other increased demand inside from Europe [0], the demand that most people tend to forget when they act like Germany is the only country dependent on Russian energy, and resources, imports.

It's also not as easily replacable as "Just go to the other gas supermarket down the street", infrastructure needs to exist and support such supply chains.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201743/russian-gas-depe...

There has already been some progress (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-made-progres... ):

"Habeck said imports of Russian oil now accounted for 25% of German imports, down from 35% before the invasion, and gas imports have been cut to 40% from 55%. Russian hard coal imports were down to 25% from 50% before the invasion."

A much smaller market than expected if Germany manages to reduce demand for gas for electricity and heating.

I've read that short and mid term the renewables boost will increase demand for gas in Germany. This is because gas power plants can be ramped up and down very quickly. Coal and nuclear power is not very dynamic.

The flexibility is needed to compensate for spikes and especially the variable output of renewables.

In addition to that: My rough back of a napkin calculation[1] shows that we'd need almost tanker per day. Is this even realistic at all?

[1] 80E6 m3 / 250E3 m3 = 320. Please correct me if I made a mistake here.

To continue the napkin math and assuming your calculations check out... Lets say the distance is 7000km and the avg. speed is 12 knots. You'd need less than 30 tankers to have a daily delivery of gas.

Something to keep in mind: No one has done anything like this at such a scale yet and Germany has formidable resources, not just a lot of money but also a big and capable engineering base. Perhaps it's going to go like some predict and innovation isn't going to be able to solve the issues along the way and everything will effectively run on overpriced gas and coal, but it might as well become a big success story. As a species, we are in pretty dire need of such a success story, so I'm pretty stoked to see this play out. Besides, it's really nice to see Germany do something visionary and daring once in a long while. The Merkel governments have been dire in this regard.

They used 142 BCM in 2021. That's 339 million cubic meters per day. The biggest LNG carriers can handle 200,000+ per shipment. That's 1695 per day... there's only 170 ships active per world wide out of the 439 currently operating.

I think these numbers are correct but maybe I am wildly off...

Somebody commented that German fertilizer is a large consumer. I doubt it will make sense to turn gas into LNG into fertilizer.

Depends on the plant capacity available for turning the gas into fertilizer before it'd need to be turned into LNG. Those may not exist.

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