I think this is the beginnings of an economy based on perpetual growth and fossil fuel energy running headlong into geological energy constraints. Basically I see an undulatory downward path for the rest of my life. From here out, I think any rallies in our economic condition are going to be met with spiking commodity prices that knock us right back down.
Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:53 am Post subject: BREAKING - Ukraine may cut Europe gas supply!!
crap!
Quote:
Ukraine has said it may restrict Russian gas supplies to Europe if gas monopoly Gazprom goes ahead with further cuts in Ukrainian supply.
State-owned Gazprom said it would cut supplies of gas to Ukraine by a further 25% on Tuesday, but said shipments to Europe would be unaffected.
A large proportion of the gas Russia sells to Europe passes through pipelines in Ukraine.
The dispute began after Russia said Ukraine had not paid its debts.
Gazprom said it reduced supplies to Ukraine by 25% on Monday after talks broke down last week.
Escalating crisis
Monday's cut effectively ended supplies of gas directly from Russia, which make up a quarter of Ukraine's imports. The rest of Ukraine's imports comes from other states but travels through Russian pipelines.
The crisis escalated on Tuesday after Gazprom announced a second cut.
Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 10:48 am Post subject: Re: BREAKING - Ukraine may cut Europe gas supply!!
Sucks to be at the end of the pipe...
-G _________________ I Have and will continue to vote against ANY politician who supports the various bailouts. Curse you for selling out our future for status quo now!
Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 2:03 pm Post subject: Re: BREAKING - Ukraine may cut Europe gas supply!!
steam_cannon,
It does. Timoshenko is trying to trip him up. Medvedev should let Gazprom do whatever it wants and stay away from direct deals with Timoshenko and her crew. They never honour their commitments.
If countries downstream get shafted, that's just too bad. Place the blame where it is due: gas thief princess Timoshenko. But I am sure that the NATO media will be painting this as some sort of Berlin blockade scenario. Maybe NATO can supply Ukraine the gas for a $65 per tcm.
Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:14 pm Post subject: Re: BREAKING - Ukraine may cut Europe gas supply!!
dissident wrote:
steam_cannon,
It does. Timoshenko is trying to trip him up. Medvedev should let Gazprom do whatever it wants and stay away from direct deals with Timoshenko and her crew. They never honour their commitments.
If countries downstream get shafted, that's just too bad. Place the blame where it is due: gas thief princess Timoshenko. But I am sure that the NATO media will be painting this as some sort of Berlin blockade scenario. Maybe NATO can supply Ukraine the gas for a $65 per tcm.
If that is the price the russians agreed on in a contract I'd know where to put the blame and so does the rest of europe, including governments. Anyway, I think it'll actually help us in the long run to know we cannot and shouldn't rely on the russians. European politicians are probably the closest ones from developed countries to realize the event horizon of peak is approaching and every push in the right direction even if for the "wrong" reason might help.
Joined: Oct 04, 2007 Posts: 221 Location: North-East USA
Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 4:52 pm Post subject: Re: BREAKING - Ukraine may cut Europe gas supply!!
ukraine is not going to cut Europe's gas
they want to get into NATO and the EU, cutting Europe's gas supplies would be a pretty retarded thing to do
most likely they'll just settle their debts...again
this sh*t happens every other week...how many times have we had Ukraine's gas cut off or threatened to be cut off..ive lost count
this crap is going to go on until russia completes the alternative pipeline route through the Baltic Sea, and then Ukraine is going to be fooked, and so is poland
thats going to be Europe's direct pipeline for the good stuff excluding the eastern bloc countries completely... soon they'll be BEGGING to join Russia in some sort of an alliance
Joined: Feb 20, 2005 Posts: 2880 Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 6:21 pm Post subject: Re: BREAKING - Ukraine may cut Europe gas supply!!
Like hell they will. This has nothing to do with geopolitics, it's just about different Ukrainian and Russian groupings trying to skim off as much profits from gas exports as they can.
Names like Nordex, Slavutich or Respublika may have been forgotten, but they were the ancestors of Itera, EuralTransGas and RusUkrEnergo, their better known, and more recent, successors. Their fundamental business model is to get the money actually paid by Ukrainian gas users and capture it while not giving a pretext to the central Ukrainian authorities to cut off gas transit.
A good way to understand what happened is to consider the situation of a big metallurgical company in Eastern Ukraine, paying its gas deliveries to Ukrgazprom in Kyiv at 80 $/tcm9—money which is never handed to Gazprom in Russia. It would certainly be profitable for that company—and for Gazprom—to be able to pay only 50 $/tcm, but to pay it directly to a trader which has access to Gazprom’s gas or its pipelines.Yet the central government in Kyiv did not allow this, thanks to its hold over Gazprom via its export pipes. But that leverage by Kyiv could be avoided if the gas were bought from someone other than Gazprom, such as Turkmenistan, which was not exporting anything to Europe. Thus the big Ukrainian industrial users teamed up with Gazprom managers and a few well placed people in the Central Asian republics to create the illusion that they were buying gas not from Gazprom, but from other suppliers—despite the fact that the gas was going through the exact same pipelines—“through Russia” instead of“from Russia.”
Other such large Ukrainian end-users then tried to grab more of the domestic gas market beyond their own needs, using their specific supply schemes. By offering gas at 60 $/tcm to other industrial users in their region, the trader got paid for more gas, and the first buyer could make a 10 $/tcm profit along the way. Of course, this undermined Ukrgazprom (which would lose revenue from paying customers), and led to vicious infighting inside Ukraine, which dominated the politics of the country for the next 10 years, as the biggest gas consumers tried to become the entity that could buy directly from the trader and sell more (at a profit) to others in Ukraine.
That money, captured by a few intermediaries, did not profit Gazprom itself, but certainly allowed a few of its well-placed managers (high enough in the hierarchy to make it possible to get several tens of billions of cubic meters of gas transported through Gazprom’s pipelines) and a few Central Asian oligarchs to make huge fortunes. The scheme is inherently unstable, as those that have to buy the gas from the local trader will always try to get rid of that middleman by going to the source. Thus metal-bashing plant no.2, which buys gas from metal-bashing plant no.1 at 60 $/tcm (who itself buys its from “Turkmen” trader at 50 $/tcm for its own needs as well as for resale within Ukraine) will try to offer 55 $/tcm to the trader to switch places with metal-bashing plant no.1. Thus Russian intermediaries played off Ukrainians one against the other to extract cash from Ukraine— something that Gazprom was structurally unable to do itself.
_________________ Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
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