Drifting LNG Tanker

Libya tows damaged Russian LNG tanker Arctic Metagaz to its west coast
euronews

Seems the war in Ukraine has overflowed into the Mediterranean. Kpler MarineTraffic tells us the ship was on its way from Tieshan Port in China to Port Said, Egypt via the Suez Canal. If the ship was going to Port Said, what was it doing over by Malta? Supposedly, they are building a LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) Terminal at Port Said, but I don't know that Egypt is big producer of natural gas. On the other hand, Algeria has a bunch of LNG terminals that are built to liquify natural gas for loading onto ships, and China has a bunch of regasification terminals for turning LNG back into gas and stuffing it into pipelines. So I suspect the ship was on its way to Algeria, empty, to pick up a load of gas for China.

Meduza reports:

Attempt to tow drifting Russian LNG tanker to Libyan port fails as vessel breaks free in rough weather April 2, 2026

An attempt to tow the drifting Russian LNG tanker Arctic Metagaz to a Libyan port has failed, Libya’s Ports and Maritime Transport Authority said on April 2.

The tanker broke free from the tugboat in rough weather. Strong winds and high waves made it impossible to reattach the tow line. The authority declared the vessel “out of control” and warned other ships to stay away from it.

• A fire broke out in early March aboard the Arctic Metagaz, a Russian-flagged tanker carrying more than 60,000 tons of liquefied natural gas, while it was in the Mediterranean Sea between Malta and Libya. The crew was evacuated, and the damaged vessel was left adrift with its cargo still on board. Russia has said the tanker was attacked by Ukrainian unmanned surface vessels.
• Winds and waves pushed the tanker toward the Libyan coast. In late March, Libya’s National Oil Corporation announced that it was forced to take emergency measures and organize a towing operation to bring the drifting tanker into a Libyan port.

Arctic Metagaz
Left to right: Arzew Algeria, Malta, Damietta & Port Said Egypt, Tienshangang China

P. S. Where did the Ukrainian attack drone come from? Magura drones, for example, have a range of 500 miles. The Ukrainian navy currently did not have any navy ships in the Mediterranean last year. Do they now? Enquiring minds want to know.

LNG - Liquified Natural Gas

LNG Abalamabie

Prices to hire an LNG carrier ship have reached new heights. It now costs $350,000 a day to hire one of these ships. Evidently, it's worthwhile proposition because even after paying the shipping costs, the gas can still be sold at a profit in Asia.

Nostromo

LNG carriers remind me of the Nostromo, the cargo ship from the first Alien movie. Giant, high-tech ship with just a handful of people on board. If they weren't such mundane, everyday things, it would make a great setting for a science fiction thriller. Of course, I doubt anyone in their right mind would allow a crew of film makers on board one of these ships. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Anyway, I'm reading along and I come across this phrase: "modern two-stroke LNG carriers" and I wonder what the heck is that? They have some new technique for compressing gas? No, it's just engine basics. Some engines (automobiles for instance) are four stroke and some engines (chainsaws, go karts) are two stroke. Likewise some diesel engines are four stroke, like Caterpillar, and some are two stroke, like Detroit Diesel.

This might be the Suehiro Maru No. 8*

I got this from a pdf from MAN Diesel and Turbo. I'm reading along and I come across this bit:

The first LNG carrier was the 150 m3 forerunner Suehiro Maru No. 8 from 1962 (scrapped 1983) with a four-stroke diesel engine as prime mover.

The capacity of the LNG Abalamabie (shown at the top) at 170,000 cubic meters is over one thousand times greater than the Suehiro Maru's capacity of 150 cubic meters.

*Turns out there is more than one Suehiro Maru No. 8. I couldn't find any pictures from the correct era. This picture supposedly came from a YouTube video, but it's not actually in there. It looks old, and it only exists as search result, so it's like a ghost picture, which is kind of appropriate for a ghost ship.

P.S. Just out of curiousity, I checked my browser's history. Putting this post together took about an hour and generated 150 entries in the history log visiting maybe 75 different pages.

Nord Stream Sabotage & the War in Ukraine

Nord Stream

From The Valdai Discussion Club:

‘Eurasia’s Geoeconomic Reshuffling’: The Multipolar Effect of the Nord Stream Explosion by Valdir da Silva Bezerra

Since the mid-20th century, Russia and Europe have established a complementary and mutually beneficial relationship in the energy sector. Now, very few people remember, but when Putin came to power in 2000, one of the new president’s ideas was to strengthen Europe’s political independence by combining the continent’s technological and industrial capabilities with Russia’s abundance of natural resources. For Putin, a united Europe was paramount to establishing continental peace, based on a fair relationship between the West and Russia. Nevertheless, in order to achieve this unity, both sides had to abandon the past stereotypes of the Cold War era; otherwise, there could be no ‘Greater Europe’, much less a united one. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, politicians in Washington were also aware of these talks about combining Russian energy assets with Europe’s industrial might.

That’s why, starting in the early 2000s, United States policymakers began to raise concerns about Europe’s “dependence on Russian energy” during official talks with their Atlantic partners, instilling fears that the continent was about to become hostage to Moscow’s ‘geopolitical ambitions’. Taking things a step further, after the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, Washington began threatening European companies with sanctions for their involvement in geoeconomic and geostrategic projects, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was slated to connect Germany and Russia via the Baltic Sea.

Finally, following the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, the world witnessed the most consequential act of infrastructure sabotage in European history, with the Nord Stream explosions of September 2022. In fact, the Nord Stream blast seemed to follow one of the most critical tenets of 20th-century British politics, formulated by the geographer Halford Mackinder, who advised against an alliance between Germany and Russia, as this would enable the Eurasian landmass to grow stronger than Great Britain’s sea power. Within that context, the cutting of Russia’s ‘umbilical cord’ to Europe represented the materialisation of Mackinder’s very advice, but at the cost of European taxpayers.

Before the blasts, Nord Stream 1 alone supplied about 55 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas per year, covering roughly 15% of all European gas consumption. The sudden loss of this infrastructure contributed to the surge in energy prices across the continent: by late 2022, wholesale natural gas prices in Europe had spiked to more than €300 per megawatt-hour—over 10 times higher than the average between 2016 and 2020. Industries dependent on cheap gas, especially in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, saw production slowdowns and temporary shutdowns, with German chemical output falling by roughly 10% in 2022. Households also faced soaring heating and electricity bills, prompting EU governments to spend over €600 billion in subsidies and emergency measures to cushion the impact. Beyond the economic shock, the explosions increased Europe’s vulnerability by forcing rapid diversification toward costlier liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and exposing the strategic risks of critical infrastructure sabotage.

An economic reshuffling also took place in Eurasia, while the amount of Russian gas flowing to Europe dropped to a minimum. Until 2021, Russia’s share in Europe’s total imports of natural gas was 43%. In 2023, this figure was down to only 14%. In Europe, the response to the Nord Stream explosion, as mentioned earlier, was marked by a diversification of gas suppliers and a change in gas logistics. If, in 2013, 82% of European gas imports came via pipelines (234 bcm) and only 18% (51 bcm) in liquefied form (LNG), by 2023, the situation had drastically reversed. LNG now represents approximately 60% of all gas imports (169 bcm) in Europe, while pipeline imports have fallen to 40% (111 bcm). That marks a 331% increase in LNG purchases by Europe over the course of a single decade! In this new scenario, the United States emerged as the leading supplier of LNG to Europe. Now, the North Americans account for approximately 45% of Europe’s LNG imports, followed by Qatar, which contributes 12% (on the other hand, Norway established itself as the largest pipeline gas supplier, accounting for about 33% of Europe’s total imports). As a result, Europe has increased its dependence on the United States, both politically and economically.

 

LNG Explosion

Tank truck with 60 TONS of gas explodes in Ulaanbaatar
Chuck Pergiel

RT reports:

The accident in Mongolia’s capital has killed six and left 14 injured. A truck carrying 60 tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) collided with a car and exploded in the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar.

 

Truck & cryogenic trailer

LNG is about half as dense as water. Cooling natural gas to −260 °F will turn it into a liquid, reducing its volume by a factor of 600. Tanks are lightly pressurized at around 4 or 5 PSI (pounds per square inch). A single trailer can carry about 30 tons of LNG, so either there were two trailers involved in this accident or somebody got the number wrong. At least they were only off by a factor of 2, not 2 zillion. Not bad for an innumerate journalist.  Where is Ulaanbaatar anyway? Middle of nowhere, that's where:

Ulaanbaatar Mongolia

Note that just past the west end of Mongolia there is a short stretch of border between Russia and China. Mongolia is surrounded by Russia and China.

SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster

SpaceX Starship Heavy Booster holds 750 tons of liquid methane (LNG is basically methane), so it's going to take 25 trailer loads to fill the booster.

Update December 2025 replaced missing video.

Russian Yamal-LNG project on the Arctic Ocean

This Cost $27 Billion Dollars to Build

I am really enjoying hearing how the US wants to employ economic sanctions against Russia, and how we are pressuring Germany to not certify the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, all supposedly to protect Ukraine, a probable hub of corruption and villainy. Or maybe we're just doing that to keep the zillion dollar commissions flowing into the Biden's pockets. Whatever. Europe gets 40% of their energy from natural gas from Russia. What do you think will happen to natural gas prices if Russia starts feeling squeezed? You will notice that Total, the French oil company, is a big investor in this project.

Qatar has a big LNG facility. It's quite a bit warmer there, so it is not as efficient at liquifying the gas as the Russian plant, but they don't have to contend with ice and transport would be shorter, so it might be a wash as to which plant is more efficient.

Aker Arctic, the company that designed the ice-breaking LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) carriers, has appeared here before. Note that while the Finnish company designed these ships, they are being built in China.

LNG carrier cargo tank cross section

The membrane in 'membrane tanks' is a thin sheet of fancy steel. One mm (millimeter) thick steel is pretty stout stuff for any everyday kind of application. The steel used to make automobile bodies is only 0.7 mm (1/32 of an inch). Ship's hulls are more like 3/4 of an inch (19 mm), so I can see how shipbuilders would consider something only 1 mm thick as a 'membrane'.

I guess the part that really bugs me about this project is that is makes us, the US, look like a bunch of gibbering fools in comparison. Putin might be a murderous thug, but I suspect he is not worse than any other powerful man and might be quite a bit better. Or maybe his PR (Public Relations) office just does a better job. I look at the crap our government continues to pull on a daily basis and I'm not sure we have any room to talk. All of which reminds me of this scene from The Godfather:

The Godfather (6/9) Movie CLIP - Working for My Father (1972) HD

Everyone in a position of power is a murderous thug. The only difference is whether they are murdering your friends or your enemies.

Djibouti Notes

Djibouti

I finally finished reading Djibouti by Elmore Leonard and now I'm finishing up my notes. 

The story is about Dara, a middle aged woman, who is in Djibouti with her assistant Xavier to film a documentary about the pirates operating out of Somalia. They meet Idris, a pirate leader, Billy, an American zillionaire, and his girlfriend Helen. Billy has a big sailboat that he sails himself. There is also Harry who is some kind of loose cannon with connections to the CIA or the military, it's never really clear. Jama is a full-blooded American terrorist. He got locked up in prison in the USA and converted to Islam and kept going.

The first 2/3 of the book are a bit of a slog. Eventually it occurred to me that Elmore may have been writing the way people talk which doesn't always translate into smooth reading. Also, in many of the scenes we have Xavier and Dara reviewing the films they have recorded that day and talking about whether what they have is good enough to be in their film.

Around about the 2/3's of the way though the book, things get lively, or rather deadly, with bodies falling left right and center. It's kind of a shock because up till then it's all cocktails, dancing and bravado.

Billy has 600 nitro express rifle. He loves to talk about it and mentions it every chance he gets. He also loves to show it off.

Cameron Mitchell shooting the .600 Nitro Express
Cam's Wild Life

LNG Tanker

While this story is meandering along, there is also a very ominous ship lurking in the background. It's a LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) tanker. Some Al-Qaeda thugs have managed to get on board and place some explosive charges that can be detonated with a call from a cell phone, all you need is the number. (And the ship has to be in range of a cell phone tower, along with a subscription that allows it to receive calls in that region of the world. Never mind this, the story never gets that far, I'm just picking nits.)

Jama has the number and is trying to decide on the best time to blow it up. His Al-Qaeda bosses have canceled this operation. This might have something to do with the gas coming from Qatar and the elite Qatarians support for terrorists. You know, if Al-Qaeda bites the hand that feeds them, they might not be getting any more doggy treats. None of that is in the story, it's just seems obvious to me. But Jama doesn't care. He likes being a terrorist and killing people.

The best place to blow up the tanker would be at an east coast port in the USA, if the gas gets delivered there. Everyone is aware of the situation, but the terrorists are no longer on the ship and no explosives have been found, so maybe there's nothing to worry about. But not finding any explosives does not mean there aren't any there, so maybe we should be worried. Billy's solution is to shoot it with his Nitro Express rifle and blow it up where it is, in the middle of the Red Sea. Multi-million dollar loss for the gas company, but not a disaster for people living around the delivery port.

While this topic is under discussion Xavier mentions the 1937 gas explosion disaster at the New London School in east Texas:

The New London School Explosion | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror
Fascinating Horror

While I was reading I took sporadic notes. Here are some things that get mentioned:

Page 45

USS Vella Gulf

Page 77

USS Bainbridge

Maersk Alabama Hijacking

Page 80 Aphrodite thousand foot long LNG tanker owned by bin Laden

Page 110 Remember we're talking about a federal system of people with semi-one track minds. You make a mistake you spend the rest of your career in a third world country so they sit on this till the twins go away.

Page 199 'the Song telling us "The sweet things in life to you were just loaned. So how can you lose what you never owned?"' - Rudy Vallee

Statue de Foch
Place du Trocadero, 75016 Paris France

Page 202 We have this passage:

Cars came around to take different streets off the Place Verdun, circling past the statue of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, 1851-1929, on a pedestal in the center of the plaza, the single word J'Attaque below his name.

Xavier said, "Ferdinand was asked what he'd do if surrounded by Germans and he said he'd attack. I believe it was at Verdun he lost somethin like eighty thousand men j'attackin." He said, "There's your man there."

So I go looking for Place Verdun and a statue of Marshal Foch in Djibouti but all I find it this poster:

Commandant Marchand - Across Africa Book Cover

Musee de L'Armee Invalides Page 34 

"In 1896, Captain Marchand was appointed to lead the Congo-Nile mission to the White Nile River, with the aim of establishing a French protectorate in southern Egypt. Marchand led a team of eight French officers and 150 Senegalese skirmishers up the Congo, Ubangi and Bahr el-Ghazal rivers, arriving in Fashoda on 10 July 1898. They built a fort and raised the French tricolour flag. In September, the Anglo-Egyptian army under General Kitchener arrived at Fashoda. French and British colonialist ambitions came face to face at Fashoda, a standoff that ended in December 1898 when the French government ordered its troops to retreat to Djibouti."

Eventually I realized Xavier was just giving an example of a particularly bull-headed soldier to describe Buck, the soldier they were meeting. Although the French were in Africa, Marshal Foch was not.

Page 203 plant Epimedium otherwise known as horny goat weed

Page 215 Billy is talking about Medal-of-Honor winners:

• Joe Foss shot down 26 Zeke's over the Solomons in his Grumman Wildcat and later became governor of South Dakota.
• Major Bing Bang Bong flying a P-38 shot down 40 doing it during his tour and gave his life testing a jet. 
• Another Ace, Pappy Boyington, a Sioux Indian, shot down his 26th over Rabul. Later that same day some nip sent Pappy down in flames. 
• I forgot the name of the Navy pilot in a Dauntless crashing into a cruiser after he'd been hit. Another hero giving his life for his country, all Medal of Honor winners. He's probably referring to Colin Kelly who was flying a Vindicator, which is very similar to the Dauntless.

Page 216 Sterling Hayden doing Jack D Ripper in the movie Dr. Strangelove

Page 217 1 cubic foot of liquefied natural gas will make 12,400 cubic feet of flammable gas air mix

Chapter 31 

Page 230 Golfo de Tadjoura
Page 243 Big Mucha Island

Previous posts: 

• Djibouti
• Chartres House

Bow = Front

Shinya Ocean at anchor off Fujairah

A Shipping Corporation of India LNG carrier collided with a very large crude carrier at a Fujairah anchorage in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday evening, resulting a major damage to the oil tanker. - Mike Schuler for gCaptain

Here is plot of what happened.


LNG Carrier Aseem Collides with VLCC Shinyo Ocean off Fujairah
Failure to communicate? Refusal to communicate? Drinking too much Kool-Aid? Whatever. Gadflys gladly fly:


Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off

. . . comedy sketch from the early 1990s, the parts of the politician and interviewer being played by Australian television comedy duo John Clarke and Brian Dawe as they discuss an oil spill that occurred in 1991 when the Greek tanker Kirki lost its bow off the coast of Western Australia. - Snopes

Previous broken ship posts here and here. LNG carrier here. Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Biden and Hamas, two of a kind

LNG tanker © Getty Images / nikkytok

Qatar is sheltering Hamas leadership. In my book that means they are supporting Hamas. Israel is currently engaged in destroying Hamas. Meanwhile the Houthis in Yemen are attacking shipping in the Red Sea, ostensibly in support of Hamas. Qatar is a big exporter of LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) and now they are worried that the Houthis are going to attack their ships. RT has the story. These guys have too much money and not enough brains.

Meanwhile fucking Joe Biden blows up the Nord Stream pipeline so now Europe needs another source of natural gas. They can buy it from the USA, which gets Joe some support, or they can buy it from other places, like Qatar, who is supporting terrorism. You can argue that blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was an act of terrorism, so fucking Joe Biden has made the USA another terrorist organization, just like Hamas. What a piece of shit.

Wednesday

Jeff Beck and ZZ Top - Ernie Ford's SIXTEEN TONS
Indivo

I started writing about the LNG explosion in Mongolia, but I tried to convert 60 tons to LNG to cubic feet and it just took too long and I got hungry. Then I got to thinking about the Mideast and I wrote something, but I'm not sure it's fit for publication, so I'm gonna sleep on it. Meanwhile, we got Jeff Beck and ZZ Top.

Nord Stream

Another take on the whole Nord Stream debacle:

Merkel blows a hole in Washington’s Nord Stream narrative by Rachel Marsden

I like this bit:

“The United States argued that its security interests were affected by the building of the pipeline because its ally Germany would make itself too dependent on Russia. In truth, I felt that the United States was mobilizing its formidable economic and financial resources to prevent the business ventures of other countries, even their allies,” Merkel writes.

“The United States was chiefly interested in its own economic interests, as it wanted to export to Europe LNG obtained through fracking.”

This pretty much establishes that it was by premeditated design that Washington leveraged the Russian military operation in Ukraine as a convenient pretext to turn economic competitor Germany – and the EU more generally – into a vassal. But Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the rest of the German and European establishment, acted like Joe Biden was just coming to their rescue out of benevolence when he offered to sell them LNG to replace Russian gas – which turned out to cost several times the price, to the ongoing detriment of German and European industry and citizenry.

While Trump and Biden are both promoting America, Biden is acting like a gangster and exploiting anyone he can get his claws in, while Trump promotes good business. 

Natural Gas

LNG - Liquefied Natural Gas This is going to be more work than going to Mars: http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/shtokman/ My brother reports: The Russian news station had a 10 minute piece on the [joint venture] on the "Barents sea Shtokman gas fields." Seemed to be a big deal. Can't really remember what they said about it, other than that it's like 51% Gazprom, and 25% each Total and Statoil. A complicated deal, with big engineering challenges, but everyone is optimistic that it's going to be an epoch-shattering success. Natural gas requires more infrastructure than oil. It is inherently more dangerous. Everything is done at high pressure, like 1000 psi, or at cryogenic temperatures. By lowering the temperature to -160 degrees Celsius (halfway to absolute zero), pressure can be reduced to nil. Shipping requires special cryogenic ships. Pipelines require special pipes and compressor stations. The US government was trying to get more LNG (liquefied natural gas) ports built, including one near the mouth of the Columbia. There was some fuss about it a few months ago. There was a high pressure main gas line running across our orchard (in Ohio). Dad paid to have a tap and a small residential line installed to the house. Tapping into the main line was like defusing a bomb: a tension filled endeavor. On the other hand, gas used to be really cheap. Mom always preached the virtues of cheap gas for heat. So I got gas heat here. Because of cheap hydro-electric power, a lot of people have all electric homes. And now gas has gotten a lot more expensive. I now notice the gas bills in the winter. And that business of trying to kill yourself by putting your head in the oven? Does not work so well with Natural Gas, but there used to be gas made from coal that was really deadly. Not used much anymore, though I am sure it is still used some places, probably in industrial processes.

Qatar & CIA Kissing in a Tree

Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Khulaifi was awarded the CIA's George Tenet medal this week [File: X/@AJArabic]

Aljazeera has the story. Qatar, the biggest producer of LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) in the Persian Gulf. Qatar, host to Hamas leadership. Qatar the magnificent, Qatar the despicable. And now they're in bed with the CIA. I pitty al-Khulaifi. I suspect there are a number of people who want his head, literally, but maybe growing up in a snakepit he has learned to dodge and weave.

Qatar, Qatar, Qatar

The World Cup (soccer) was held in Qatar this year.  Argentina won. Cool,  I guess.

My nephew Nick has returned from a two month sojourn in India. He visited Delhi and points north up to the Himalayas. I imagine he had some good times, but his trip to the mountains was an adventure, as in an ordeal. Anyway, his flight from Seattle took him over the North Pole and Russia to Doha, Qatar. That struck me as a little weird, I mean Qatar seems to be a bit out of the way. And they flew over Russia. I guess that's okay since we aren't technically at war with Russia, are we? Whatever, let's try and plot that flight.

Google Maps makes a hash of it
That is not a polar route

Google Earth gets it right,
but at the expense of detail.
It was also a pain in the neck to use.

Well, that sucks. Surely someone out there can do this.

Great Circle Map might be technically accurate,
but the drawing is horribly distorted

GC Map did it better,
but it was awkward to use and not much detail

I swear last year plotting these kind of routes was much easier.

LNG Tanker Loading in Qatar

In other news, Europe is trying to replace the natural gas they were getting from Russia with Liquefied Natural Gas from Qatar. Someone recently tried to build a natural gas pipeline across the Mediterranean from the middle east to Europe, but Uncle Joe squashed it. Biden must hate Europe as much as he hates Russia.

Conversion Calculations

Simple Conversion

I'm reading somebody's theory about how natural gas figures into the power struggles going on between Europe, the USA, Russia and Ukraine, and I come across this line:

The total US LNG output according to the EIA for 2022 is 11.5 bcf per day, which is 115 bcm per year, or roughly the capacities of Nord Stream 1 and 2 combined. 

I take bcf to mean billions of cubic feet and bcm to mean billions of cubic meters and I notice that  the number give for bcm per year is ten times the amount given for bcf per day, which makes me wonder if this could be right? So I haul out my trusty spreadsheet and check, and lo and behold it does. 

Of course a little mental arithmetic could assure you that the numbers are at least in the same ball park. A cubic yard holds 27 cubic feet and cubic meter is a little bigger than a cubic yard. Ten times 27 is 270 which is roughly the same size as 365, so yeah, it could be, but it still seems to be too much of a coincidence so I had to check.

Arctic

Arctic Ocean

Found this in a story on Unherd:

Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.

I read a couple more paragraphs and decided whatever they were talking about didn't interest me, but here's some pictures of Russia's nuclear ice breaker Arktika.

The "Arktika" is the first days of January sailing north of the Taymyr Peninsula awaiting to assist an LNG tanker coming from Asia via the Northern Sea Route. Photo: Rosatomflot

Arktika, the first of three LK-60 icebreakers

 

Power of Siberia Pipeline #2

Power of Siberia Pipeline

Watching European leaders blundering around, sliding farther down the slope everyday, heading toward the abyss, is like watching a movie about crazy people. Nothing they do makes any sense, but given we have big name actors playing these parts, you think there must be some secret plan they are following and one of these days they will explain it and it will all become clear. Or maybe they really are just stupid and crazy. Here's another brick in the wall:

Did you notice the EU just lost its gas lifeline?

The EU’s cheap-gas lifeline just got handed to Beijing instead. With three signatures, Russia, China and Mongolia rerouted half a century of energy history eastward.

On Tuesday, the three countries signed a legally binding memorandum for the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline – a roughly 2,600-km line, at an estimated cost of around $13.6 bn, that will carry 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas every year through Mongolia into northern China’s industrial heartland. 

While the pricing structure has yet to be fixed, the signatories have effectively redrawn the European energy map.

For decades, this gas was the bedrock of German and Western European industry, piped from Russia’s Yamal fields in the Arctic through Nord Stream 1 directly into Germany. Now, that same supply is being redirected east.

I have previously posted about several of the places that are shown on the map:

Amur	Amur Bridge Project
Komsomolsk-on-Amur	Komsomolsk-on-Amur
Novosibirsk	Su-57
Urengoy	Failing Conventionally
Vladivostok	Many posts
Yamal	Russian Yamal-LNG project on the Arctic Ocean

I read the news today, oh boy.

Dumpster Fire

Surprise, surprise! Daily lease rates for LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) tankers have gone up due to the demand from Europe. Biden is allowing Venezuela to export oil, and is talking about getting oil from Iran. Somebody in the US government is saying that Ukraine should negotiate a settlement with Russia. Do we have clowns running the US government? Oh, that's right, we do. Stupid, murderous, barbarian clowns.

Normally I would link to all these stories, but who needs it?

High-Speed Ferry Francisco

The Fastest Ship World has ever Seen

“This is certainly the fastest ship in the world,” said Incat managing director Kim Clifford. “Of course there's a few speed boats that could surpass 58 knots, but nothing that could carry 1,000 passengers and 150 cars, and with an enormous duty-free shop on board.”The Francisco is the world's first high-speed ferry that uses liquefied natural gas (LNG) as primary fuel.

I did a little checking, and for its size it may very well be the fastest ship ever. The US Navy built some hydrofoils but they only got up to around 45 knots.

This vessel provides ferry service between Buenas Aires, Argentina and several places along the coast of Uruguay, including Montevideo.

Via Posthip Scott.

Update March 2019 replaced missing video.

Update January 2022 replaced missing video.

News Links

Scanning the headlines on Feedly and these four all showed up on one page. Criminently, if this a tragedy or a comedy?

DOJ Confirms: Hunter Biden Laptop Was Real This Whole Time

Watch the rats scurry for the exits now that the head puppet is being abandoned.

Anthony Blinken Stranded In Davos After His Boeing 737 Breaks Down

Just the kind of news Boeing needs.

Biden Weighs Banning Natural Gas Exports To Save The Climate

Near as I can make out, Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipeline to punish Germany for being: (a) too successful, (b) not spending enough on defense, (c) because they weren't punished enough for WW2 or (d) because he wanted them to buy more LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) from the USA.

Firesale: Blackstone's Defaulted Manhattan Office Tower Loan Marketed At 50% Discount

I suspected COVID would have an impact on downtown real estate. Here's another post.

 

Mohammad Gunn

Peter Gunn Theme by Henry Mancini
This tune has been popping up on YouTube lately. It's kind of a cool tune and I enjoy listening to it. Then I noticed that the group of performers is the Qatar Philharmonic Brass, which struck me as a little odd, so a-Googling I go.

Sheikha Moza bint Nasser

The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra . . . was founded in 2007 by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the then Emir of Qatar's consort. - Wikipedia

Sheikha got her money the old fashioned way: she married it.

[Emir of Qatar] Hamad seized power in a bloodless palace coup d'état in 1995. During his 18-year rule, Qatar's natural gas production reached 77 million tonnes, making Qatar the richest country in the world per capita with the average income in the country US$86,440 a year per person. - Wikipedia

LNG Rivers, a Liquified Natural Gas carrier

I presume the 77 million tons is an annual figure, which is a goodly quantity in anybodies book. Natural gas can be liquefied and then transported by ship, much like oil is transported in tankers. However, this an inconvenient process as the gas must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures.

Crude Oil Price since 2000

There is a process that can convert natural gas into liquid hydrocarbons. It was discovered in 1925 by some German chemists, but it also a complicated procedure that requires expensive equipment.  The run-up in the price of oil that started around 2005 convinced some people, including the Emir, that building a plant to perform this conversion was a worthwhile idea.

An aerial view of Shell's gas-to-liquid plant in Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar

ORYX GTL Plant. Just down the road from the Shell plant in Qatar.

It appears that two of the biggest plants built for performing this conversion are in Qatar, a small country located on a peninsula projecting from the western shore of the Persian Gulf. Billions of dollars have been sunk into these projects which makes them comparable to the big integrated circuit factories that make our computer chips.

Qatar on the Persian Gulf

Temperatures during the summer can be 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not much different than Phoenix Arizona, but the humidity is much higher as you might expect being as it is surrounded by the sea. But then I checked the weather today and it is a balmy 70 degrees. So, for six months of the year it is nice, much like many places on Earth.

Previous appearance of Peter Gunn here.