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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

I found this section from another page on the same site amusing:

> Nord Stream developed a high environmently-conscious logistic concept which guarantees that transport vessels have not to travel more than 100 nautical miles (185 kilometers). [...] This concept of short trips and environmentally friendly transport saves roughly 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide when compared against other options and the use of existing concrete coating plants.

-- https://www.wermac.org/nordstream/nordstream_part4.html

For comparison, each of the two Nord Stream pipelines can (well, could) deliver enough natural gas to create more than 150,000 tons of CO2 emissions per day.

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Yeah. Oil & gas companies are masters of this sort of greenwashing.

Ok, that is about the maintenance logistics. Now let's compare what emissions could be saved by using the pipelines instead of importing U.S. and Russian LNG (via China!) on polluting ships.

Yes, but most likely the fact that the natural gas is being used instead of oil or coal leads to a large net reduction in carbon emissions

What about the fact that the natural gas is being used instead of nuclear power?

People tend to forget that while gas is being used for energy production, it is also being used as basis of chemical processes, e.g. for ammonia production, which then starts a whole chain of products (most prominently: carbonic acid, fertilizer, cooling, removing CO2 from industrial exhaust, ...)

We can't just replace natural gas with nuclear power, even if we did, we'd still be in deep trouble.

What percentage is that versus what is just burned? We need oil for plastics too but the vast majority of it is burned.

Blame the extremely hypocritical green parties for that.

I know. In our state we're very pro-nuclear and the local Green party basically ended itself over this issue. I used to think that's surely going to happen in Germany too - such a scientific, rational and pragmatic nation/state, right? But oh well, seems like economical pragmatism wins over ecology and health.

Those 150k tons are for heating people's homes. Whereas the spend on the boat fuel is simply for construction of the pipeline so if you can optimize that, that's under your control, as the company laying pipe right now.

Though maybe you prefer everyone die of cold until we have a solution to transition out of natural gas without returning to coal or wait 10 years to build more nuclear.

>Those 150k tons are for heating people's homes.

This is a misrepresentation: natural gas is used for a variety of purposes, with industry and home use approximately tied, varying by EU country. Germany for example, uses more natural gas for industrial purposes than heating homes.

>Though maybe you prefer everyone die of cold until we have a solution to transition out of natural gas without returning to coal or wait 10 years to build more nuclear.

This kind of personal vitriol doesn't belong on Hacker News.

What personal vitriol? What do you think will happen during winter if we don't rollout natural gas pipelines due to environmental impact? Maybe I said it too bluntly but it is the effect.

In my country (portugal) since I was young every winter many people die of cold because it's too expensive to heat their homes. This is in a developed EU country and before any pressures post supply chain disruptions. I think middle class people have a romantic view of the world where nobody is dying like this nowadays, but a simple 10% increase in home heating prices will cause extra deaths during winter. I know there's other things that could be done but my argument is that these pipes need to be built today, and it's not dumb to try and build them in a way that is environmentally friendly instead of just throwing our hands up because it's gas so it has to be purely bad.

NS2 was started ten years ago and cost around nine billion euros. Nine billion buys a lot of insulation, heat pumps, and wind turbines over ten years. Wheras NS2 was only ever needed so that Russia can turn off gas for Ukraine without turning it off for Germany.

I think it was more about Germany being able to buy gas straight from Russia without having to pay fees to Poland/Ukraine/Belarus/whoever for transporting gas through their territory.

Sure but it's a poor deal.

Poland takes ~200 million euro for 30 bcm (0.15 bcm/m euro) over ~700 km of pipeline [1]. NS2 would cost 9.5 billion while transporting 110 bcm (0.01 bcm/m euro) [2]. It would take over a decade to break even (ignoring maintenance costs or any sort of cost overrun) and the world has been moving away from fossil fuels so it'd break even at a time when nobody wants it.

[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/can-ukraine-do-without-russian-gas-tra... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#:~:text=For%20Nord....

Uncanny how the war escalated around the time NS2 was ready...

What is uncanny is how the US started taking notice of NS2 around 2020, with Congress threatening sanctions against Germany [1], and Biden ominously talking about how there's going to be "no more Nord Stream 2" [2].

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-germany-displeased-at-us... [2] https://iuvmpress.news/biden-ready-to-stop-nord-stream-2-if-...

> or wait 10 years to build more nuclear

Maybe not closing nuclear would have been enough.

No, or we wouldn't have needed gas a couple of years ago.

A couple of years ago???

Around 2010 they had 17 reactors, then they shut down 8. Last years they only had 6 running, now only 3.

Yeah, they needed gas alright, because nuclear seems so much worse...

Habeck (Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action) went on live TV a week or two ago and called German nuclear power plants a "high risk technology" that "needs to be shut down as planned". There has never been a nuclear accident in a German NPP and they've consistently achieved a 90 % capacity factor.

Now, NPPs are of course pretty expensive, and purely from a $/kWh perspective it's pretty difficult for the large-scale-engineering kind of power plant (this extends to any kind of thermal plant) to compete with the cheaper renewables. But $/kWh is not everything - NPPs are plannable and commandable capacity (unless you're the French), renewables aren't, so their kilowatt-hours are not actually directly comparable.

Naturally natural gas especially in Germany is not primarily used for electricity generation, but largely for process heat, residential heating and as a chemical. A lot of that could be replaced by using electricity, but that'd be quite expensive, too. However, even though natgas isn't used primarily for electricity, due to merit order / economic dispatch the gas price has a hugely outsized impact on electricity prices. This, among with very high taxes and dues on electricity, is what causes world-record prices in Germany.

With 17 reactors Germany still consumed a lot of gas. Even if electricity were 100% nuclear, Germany would still consume a lot of gas. Only a small percentage of the gas Germany uses is burned for electricity. Most goes towards heating homes and industrial processes.

Why do you need gas to heat homes??? Heat pumps seem like the most ecological solution.

Let's face it, we're in this shit because of political shortsightedness, not because it was the best way to go.

We're talking about whether keeping the nuclear plants on would have made Germany independent of Russian gas. If we had heat pumps everywhere we might as well use renewable energy, that's cheaper than nuclear.

Sorry but I call bullshit on your story. Just look at this chart: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

For power generation, lignite and coal stayed about the same, gas increased from 20 to 30, oil stayed about the same. The only thing that went significantly down was nuclear going from 22.4 to 8.1.

It all depends on where your priorities are, and obviously getting rid of nuclear was more important than burning Russian stuff into the atmosphere.

Your chart shows installed capacity, which is different from total power output. For gas plants in particular, since they are used as peaker plants with low capacity factors. In 2021 only 12% of the natural gas consumed in Germany was turned into electricity. In 2011 it was 14%.

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...

Ok, no problem. If you don't want to see it, you don't see it.

Congrats on Germany for their excellent energy management and master strategic decision to get rid of their nuclear plants. Absolute legend.

If there had been no reliance on Russian gas, there would have been alternatives already. Turns out there are always alternatives, and they are simply a bit more expensive (and some times not even that). The parts of the South and Central European continent that relied on coal oil or gas for heat and electricity literally never had to rely on any of those. It was simply being cheap, wasting one generation and countless tons of CO2. Using fossil hydrocarbons for domestic heating is absurd, and it was as absurd 30 years ago.

Well, not anymore, it's been sabotaged.

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