High Natural Gas Prices-Everyone Wins Except You
China and Russia laughing all the way to the bank along with the Global Elite and the Great Resetters
This world is completely insane unless you can step back and see the Big Picture. If you can it makes perfect sense. Read on if you dare thanks to this important article by William Engdahl.
On August 22 the exchange-traded market price for natural gas in the German THE (Trading Hub Europe) gas hub was trading more than 1000% higher than a year ago. Most citizens are told by the Scholz regime that the reason is Putin and Russia’s war in Ukraine. The truth is quite otherwise. EU politicians and major financial interests are using Russia to cover what is a Made in Germany and Brussels energy crisis. The consequences are not accidental.
1000% is more than 20 x the price. Somebody is making out like a bandit and someone is getting screwed (the little guys)
It is all part of the EU plan to deindustrialize one of the most energy-efficient industrial concentrations on the planet. This is the UN Green Agenda 2030 otherwise known as Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.
Of course, but hopefully you knew that since it was clear from day 1 the Sanctions on Russia were all about the Great Reset and Carbon Net Zero (not to mention depopulation)
For almost two decades the EU Commission, backed by the mega banks such as JP MorganChase or large speculative hedge funds, began to lay the basis for what is today a complete deregulation of the market for natural gas.
These guys are the biggest beneficiaries of the Federal Reserved money pump so basically the US is financing the trades that inflate energy prices
What it now allows is for unregulated real-time free market trading to fix prices rather than long-term contracts.
Unregulated is a cover for Collusion (aka Conscious Parallelism for those who wish to pretend its legal)
The largest supplier, Russia’s Gazprom, provided gas to the EU, most especially to Germany, in long-term contracts pegged to the price of oil. Until the last several years almost no gas was imported by LNG ships. With a change in US laws to allow export of LNG from the huge shale gas production in 2016 US gas producers began a major expansion of LNG export terminal construction. The terminals take an average of 3 to 5 years to build. At the same time Poland, Holland and other EU countries began to build LNG import terminals to receive the LNG from abroad.
For those who don’t remember the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 were agreed to and reported in 2015-2016. Klaus Schwab book The Fourth Industrial Revolution was written in 2016.
Since the 1980s Wall Street banks, led by Goldman Sachs, created a new market in “paper oil,” or futures and derivative trading of future oil barrels. It created a huge casino of speculative profits that was controlled by a handful of giant banks in New York and the City of London.
Those same powerful financial interests have been working for years to create a similar globalized “paper gas” market in futures they could control.
A lot of the evil today as a result of the financialization and deindustrialization of the Western Economies were made possible by policies hatched by Reagan and Thatcher on both sides of the pond
The big banks and energy interests that control EU policy in Brussels had created a new independent price system parallel to the long-term, stable prices of Russian pipeline gas which they did not control.
By 2019 the series of bureaucratic energy directives of the Brussels EU Commission allowed fully deregulated gas market trading to de facto set the prices for natural gas in the EU, despite the fact that Russia was still by far the largest gas import source.
A series of virtual trading “hubs” had been established to trade gas futures contracts in several EU countries. By 2020 the Dutch TTF (Title Transfer Facility) was the dominant trading center for EU gas, the so-called EU gas benchmark. Notably, TTF is a virtual platform of trades in futures gas contracts between in trades between banks and other financial investors, “Over-The-Counter.”
That means it is de facto unregulated, outside any regulated exchange. This is critical to understand the game being run in the EU today.
In 2021 only 20% of all natural gas imports to the EU were LNG gas, whose prices were largely determined by futures trades in the TTF hub, the EU de facto gas benchmark, owned by the Dutch Government, the same government destroying its farms for a fraudulent nitrogen pollution claim.
The largest import share of European gas came from Russia’s Gazprom supplying more than 40% of EU imports in 2021. That gas was via long term pipeline contracts whose price was vastly lower than today’s TTF speculation price.
Only by destroying the Russian gas market in the EU could financial interests and the Green Deal advocates create their LNG market control.
With full EU backing for the new gas wholesale market, Brussels, Germany and NATO began systematically to close stable, long-term pipeline gas to the EU.
Algeria announced the Maghreb-Europe (MGE) gas pipeline, which was launched in 1996, would cease operation on October 31, 2021,
In September 2021 Gazprom completed its multibillion dollar undersea Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia across the Baltic Sea to northern Germany. .......The EU Commission, backed by the Biden Administration, blocked opening of the pipeline with bureaucratic sabotage, and finally German Chancellor Scholz imposed sanction on the pipeline on February 22 over Russian recognition of Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic.
Then on May 12, 2022 although Gazprom deliveries to the Soyuz gas pipeline through Ukraine were uninterrupted for almost three months of conflict, despite Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, the NATO-controlled Zelenskyy regime in Kiev closed a major Russian pipeline through Lugansk, that was binging Russian gas both to his Ukraine as well as EU states, declaring it would remain closed until Kiev gets full control of its pipeline system that runs through the two Donbass republics. That section of the Ukraine Soyuz line cut one-third of gas via Soyuz to the EU.
Next came the Jamal Russian gas pipeline through Belarus and through Poland to Germany. In December 2021, two months before the Ukraine conflict, the Polish government closed the Polish part of the pipeline cutting Gazprom gas delivery at low prices to Germany as well as Poland.
The Polish government refused to renew its gas contract with Russia, and instead buys gas on the free market for vastly higher prices.
Finally gas delivery via Nord Stream 1 undersea pipeline has been interrupted because of needed repair of a Siemens-made gas turbine. The turbine was sent to a special facility of Siemens in Canada where the anti-Russian Trudeau regime held it for months before finally releasing it on request of German government. Yet they deliberately refused to grant the delivery to its Russian owner, but instead to Siemens Germany, where it sits, as the German and Canadian governments refuse to grant a legally binding sanctions exemption for the transfer to Russia.
And now Putin is closing down Nord Stream I completely due to difficulties in maintain the line due to sanctions, and as we shall see, perhaps another reason
In January, 2020 Gazprom began sending gas from its TurkStream pipeline through Turkey and on to Bulgaria and Hungary. In March 2022 Bulgaria unilaterally, with NATO backing, cut its gas supplies from TurkStream.
On August 28, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, the sole cabinet member from the Liberal Party (FDP), revealed that under the opaque terms of the complex EU Electricity Market Reform measures, the producers of electricity from solar or wind automatically receive the same price for their “renewable” electricity they sell to the power companies for the grid as the highest cost, i.e. natural gas!
Well, thats one way to make investing in Renewable Energy more profitable.
http://www.williamengdahl.com/englishNEO31August2022.php
It gets even crazier.
China has been soaking up more Russian natural gas so far this year, while imports from most other sources declined. In July, the SCMP reported that according to Chinese customs data, in the first six months of the year, China bought a total of 2.35 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) – valued at US$2.16 billion. The import volume increased by 28.7% year on year, with the value surging by 182%. It meant Russia surpassed Indonesia and the United States to become China’s fourth-largest supplier of LNG so far this year.
This, of course, is not to be confused with pipeline gas, where Russian producer Gazprom recently announced that its daily supplies to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline had reached a new all-time high (Russia is China’s second-largest pipeline natural gas supplier after Turkmenistan), and earlier revealed that the supply of Russian pipeline gas to China had increased by 63.4% in the first half of 2022.
China imports over half of the natural gas it consumes, with around two-thirds in the form of LNG, demand this year had fallen sharply amid economic headwinds and widespread shutdowns. In other words, why the surge in Russian LNG when i) domestic demand is just not there and ii) at the expense of everyone else?
China sure is bringing in a lot of Gas for its Locked Down Economy. Whats up with that? Read on.
China has been quietly reselling Russian LNG to the one place that desperately needs it more than anything. Europe... and of course, it is charging a kidney's worth of markups in the process.
Ah ha! Does anyone really believe that China is not kicking back some of these profits from Russian Gas to Russia. No wonder Putin was happy to close Nord Stream 1. EU will still get Russian gas but instead of at the lower long term contract price they will pay Russia through China at the higher market rate. China also wins since they are the biggest supplier of Renewable Energy hardware which the inflated gas prices paid by Europeans is creating more demand for their products.
I am becoming more and more convinced that these Conflicts with Russia, China and NATO while real on the 2D Chessboard, on the 3D Chessboard these conflicts are simply a means of the Global Elites to achieve certain outcomes which facilitate the Great Reset .
The outcomes include but are not limited
Depopulation
Lower Living Standards (reduced consumption)
Authoritarian Control
End of Democracy
Install a Digital Gulag
If you think both parties are not in on it at the 3D Level you will soon find out how wrong you are. Party Politics is just Fake Wrestling to distract you so you will sit back and Hope for some Political Savior to Save You rather than Act to Save Yourself and Family. Its Hopium. Easily just as harmful as Opium, perhaps more so.