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Joy and relief: The last pipe of the controversial Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline was welded with a delay of more than a year and a half.
It is expected that the first gas will flow through the new pipeline in October.
Frank Dohmen DER SPIEGEL
»There are still no approvals, so a final approval has to be issued, a final approval from Germany and the EU must be granted at the end, but the pipeline is now ready. And if there are no difficulties with the test, then gas can be delivered from Russia to Germany or to the EU via this pipeline and there is not much left that could somehow prevent someone from doing that. "
Above all, the resistance of the USA, which threatened and also imposed sanctions on the line, delayed the construction of the pipeline.
The German and US governments reached an agreement in July that stipulates that Russia will be sanctioned if the Kremlin uses the 1,200-kilometer pipeline as a “geopolitical weapon”.
Frank Dohmen DER SPIEGEL
»Germany has not made many friends in the EU by supporting this pipeline.
From the beginning the EU was against this project out of economic considerations because it saw a big, a big axis Germany Russia, which was dangerous for it.
But the Baltic states, above all, because they believed they would become dependent on them, which could have dire economic consequences for them. "
More than ten billion euros flowed into the project, through which around 55 billion cubic meters of gas will be transported from Russia to Germany every year.
According to the operating company, this could supply 26 million households.
The question arises as to whether so much gas is still needed due to the urgently needed energy transition?
Frank Dohmen DER SPIEGEL
»Now the demand for energy will be considerable over the next few years.
And the one after gas, from my point of view, because we will convert this entire system, this entire energy system, to hydrogen as well.
So a major transformation in which gas may still be needed as a transition technology. "
Gas-fired power plants will still be urgently needed in the next ten or twenty years, even during the energy transition.
But instead of gas, another energy supplier from Russia could also be delivered through the pipes in the future.
Frank Dohmen THE MIRROR
“It's not for nothing that the Russians are already playing with the idea of using this pipeline to transport hydrogen at some point, i.e. upgrading or retrofitting it so that it is not used to transport gas, but rather to transport hydrogen. A gas that is then used in production in Germany or Europe in a CO2-neutral manner. "
Russia has always been a reliable gas supplier for Germany in the past.
In this respect, Nord Stream 2 is a success story.
However:
Frank Dohmen DER SPIEGEL “The negative side of this is that under Putin this gas was also used again in part as a political instrument. And you can understand Ukraine and of course you can understand the Poles and many Baltic states, who are afraid that they will now be excluded from a secure source of income and that the pressure on them will be greater because the state income that they have generated as a result, are no longer there. "
Only the future will tell whether anyone could really prevent Putin from exerting political pressure with the help of the pipeline.
