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Comment by AnonymousPlanet | Hacker News Reader

> Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify?

Diversify towards what? The biggest consumers of gas is heating homes and the chemical industry. Most houses have gas or oil heating. Do you convert from gas back to oil? Or to coal? Because most urban housing in Germany cannot be easily transferred to heat pumps, you know. The cost for conversion is prohibitive. In most cases you would have to cancel rental contracts to free the flat for conversion. How do you convince house owners and tenants to go with such a mad stunt that will mutliply their heating costs? All for a hunch of "someone might do something crazy in the east".

How do you convert a chemical industry that cannot subsitute gas for any other product? Push them abroad?

Please have reasonable and informed answers to these questions before asking question like

> And why, given the current consequences of that past failure, are people trying to defend Germany's past bad decisions?

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Your lecture would have been more reasonable if I had not already given a specific example of diversification. Namely the construction of a LNG terminal.

Here are numbers for you. The Sabine Pass LNG project in Louisiana, USA, was constructed for about $5 billion. Its capacity is almost exactly the same as the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was constructed for approximately €15.7 billion. Thus for 1/3 of the cost of the pipeline, Germany could have provided themselves a backup plan for Russian gas, while requiring zero changes from industry and consumers.

This one time investment would have been a fraction of what Germany spends each year subsidizing renewable energy, and a drop compared to the cost of shutting down nuclear. Therefore the cost of making sure that there was a second supplier of gas available would have been quite reasonable to do some years ago.

Given that it hasn't been done, it is impossible to do on short notice. But Germany could have done it, should have done it, and was repeatedly advised by allies to do exactly that. And failed to.

> Your lecture would have been more reasonable if I had not already given a specific example of diversification. Namely the construction of a LNG terminal.

> Here are numbers for you. The Sabine Pass LNG project in Louisiana, USA, was constructed for about $5 billion. Its capacity is almost exactly the same as the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was constructed for approximately €15.7 billion. Thus for 1/3 of the cost of the pipeline, Germany could have provided themselves a backup plan for Russian gas, while requiring zero changes from industry and consumers.

LNG isn't even in the ballpark of what would be needed to replace Russian gas in volume. About 40 LNG terminals are currently operational in the EU. Even if you could use their full capacity, it wouldn't be enough to replace Russian gas. And it wouldn't affect prices positively aswell. LNG is only good for preventing actual shortages, not replacing the source. Even if Germany had built 5 LNG terminals in the last decade, it would be a drop in the bucket.

There is an old saying that when you are in a hole, you should stop digging. You aren't following that advice though.

I claim that an LNG terminal on the scale of the Sabine Pass LNG project could replace Nord Stream 1. You claim that 5 such terminals would be a drop in the bucket. Let's look at numbers and see who is right.

Nord Stream 1's official capacity is 55 billion cubic meters a year of LNG. (They actually run a bit more than that.) Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kremlin-nord-stream-...

Sabine Pass is the largest LNG terminal in the world. Its capacity is 55.4 million metric tonnes per year. Source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263935/largest-operatio...

Those numbers are close, but the units are different. But 1 million metric tons LNG = 1.38 billion cubic meters LNG. Source: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c6-89....

Therefore a single LNG terminal on the same scale as the Sabine Pass LNG project would provide 139% of the official capacity of Nord Stream 1.

Do you have any more "corrections" to offer? Or do you wish to keep digging the hole you are in?

> Nord Stream 1's official capacity is 55 billion cubic meters a year of LNG

Hmm... Are you saying liquified natural gas is pumped through North Stream?

Oops, that was clearly a mistake. Thanks for catching it.

Natural Gas is pumped through Nord Stream. But it is not sent in liquid form. If it was, then keeping the pipeline sufficiently cold and pressurized would be an insane challenge.

This is partly true. There were LNG terminals planned and are now being planned again AFAIK and also see sibling. There were/are some woes though as can for example be seen here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-30/german-ln...

Funny the timing is though.

Interesting comparison. Germany's GDP is ~$3T, so a $5B insurance policy is well worth it, even had it not made any revenue, which it seems obv it would have.

Side note..

SabinePass[1] 30 million tonnes = 30 billion kgs per annum NordStream1[2], 55 billion cubic metres a year

Are those about equiv? LNG is 430 kg/m3, 55Bm3*430kg/m3=23,650Bkg, so 1000x more via NordStream, assuming same density. But looks like pipelines may be lightly compressed vs ships more typically higher compressed LNG? Anyone know?

[1]https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cheniere-completes-n... [2]https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kremlin-nord-stream-... [3]http://www.kosancrisplant.com/media/5648/1-lng_basics_82809_...

I presented my calculation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558820.

Statistica reports a much higher capacity than your Reuters article reference. Using the same a million tonnes of LNG is 1.38 billion cubic meters that I referenced there, that would still be 52.44 billion cubic meters.

My best guess for the (rather large) discrepancy is that Statistica is reporting on how much LNG is able to pass through the terminal, while Reuters is quoting how much they are able to liquify there for export.

To answer your other question, a pipeline carries natural gas as a gas, while we ship it in in liquid form in pressurized containers. Therefore ships carry natural gas in a much denser form than pipelines do.

Germany has lignite to use for electricity and oil for heating, as you said. That should be enough to reduce demand and thus prices.

Long-term there are gas reserves in Netherlands , in the mediterranean etc. The EU has options.

I have to also ask why? Germany obviously has options but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe

> Germany obviously has choices but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe

I think the problem here is that the Germans would rather have war in Eastern Europe (people of which they probably don't consider important) than more expensive heating.

Germany has taken 900,000 refugees. Why not send them to a similarly sized U.S. state and watch the reactions?

U.S. citizens already complain about gas prices (which are still much lower than in Europe). How about raising them the European prices and see if they still virtue signal?

As usual, the U.S. supports a war and Europe pays for it.

How would you propose to end the war? Who do you think should pay for it, and how should they pay?

> As usual, the U.S. supports a war and Europe pays for it.

This is somewhere between extremely biased and dead wrong.

According to https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s..., the USA is spending more to support Ukraine than Europe both in absolute dollars, and as a share of GDP. (Various eastern European countries are pulling their weight. The western ones, aren't.)

Of course that is tracking money sent to Ukraine. Refugees are a cost mostly borne by Europe. According to https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/39775/hosting-ukrainian..., the cost of refugees for a year is on par with what the USA is sending to Ukraine. This would take Europe's share above the USA.

But if you're going to include that, you should note that Germany alone spends about $20 billion year less on its own defense than it committed to spending by being part of NATO. (Germany spends about 1.5% of GDP and promised to spend 2%. It is hardly alone.) Given decades of Europe freeloading off of American generosity, paying for the refugee crisis doesn't even begin to balance the scales.

There is something funny about 1 day old account with pre-canned anti-US talking points.

I am in Eastern Europe and US has been a great ally doing everything they can to keep us safe from Russian aggression, while Germany would watch us get raped and murdered and enslaved and do nothing.

As for refugees, Poland, Romania and Slovakia have taken several millions of them despite being poor compared to rich Germany.

The oil for heating has been phased out in favour of gas because of emissions. So for most homes this would mean to convert back to bulky oil tanks. It's probably cheaper than heat pumps and you can keep the plumbing. The plumbing and use of radiators is a big problem for heat pumps because of the higher temperatures that are needed to heat radiators on the 4th floor etc.

Other houses never had oil. They switched from coal straight to gas in the 60s and 70s. But here the furnace is usually on the same floor as the radiators. But conversion is still expensive.

> Germany obviously has options but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily?

It's not taboo to ask to change policies. Actually a lot of policies are changing. Even support for nuclear is on the rise.

But one of these changes in policies might have to be abandoning some goals of emission reduction. One of the reasons why gas was on the move up is because it burns much cleaner than oil or coal. So converting all that oil heating to gas was incentivised by the government. Also gas is much better in filling in the gaps for renewables than nuclear or coal which can't be switchted off again so easily.

The plan was to move from coal to renewables. The path there was via gas. A very reasonable bridge technology.

Putin's war came too early for that conversion but luckily not too late to stop switching coal to gas.

BTW, Germany never had enough nuclear plants to provide more than about a quarter of today's electric demand anyway. Most was coal. Even if Germany never decided to phase out nuclear, the problems would pretty much have the same magnitude.

OK so the changes are totally doable and would nullify Putin's weaponization of natgas. We are at war , yet Germans seem to be totally inflexible to postponing "some goals of emission reduction" for a few years. That's unreasonable

> move from coal to renewables. The path there was via gas.

It's disingenuous to call that "a path" because natgas will never go away since renewables are wildly intermittent and natgas will always be needed to sustain the load. And it is imported from some of the worst dictatorships in the region.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

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