Wednesday, May 21, 2014 7:53:58 PM
Russia, China Finally Ink Landmark Energy Deal
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which suggests the headline .. "China Doesn't Back Russia's Invasion Of Crimea — And That's A Big Problem For Putin" was maybe a bit off the mark, or at least no really big deal ..
.. bit more from the one i am replying to ..
"The reality is that China is breaking Russia's control over the gas basins of Central Asia systematically and ruthlessly. Turkmenistan's gas used to flow North, hostage to prices set by Gazprom. It now flows East. President Xi went in person last September to open the new 1,800 km pipeline to China from the Galkynysh [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/us-gas-turkmenistan-galkynysh-idUSBRE9830MN20130904 ] field, the world's second largest with 26 trillion cubic meters.
It will ultimately supply 65 BCM, equal to half Gazprom's exports to Europe. Much the same is going on in Kazakhstan, where Chinese companies have taken over much of the energy industry. The politics are poignantly exposed in Wikileaks cables from Central Asia. A British diplomat is cited in a 2010 dispatch describing the "Chinese commercial colonization" of the region, saying Russia was "painfully" watching its energy domination in Central Asia slip away.
Yet more revealing is a cable quoting Cheng Guoping, China's ambassador to Kazakhstan, warning that Russia and China are on a collision course, and China will not be the one to yield. "In the future, great power relations in Central Asia will be complicated, delicate. The new oil and gas pipelines are breaking Russia's monopoly in energy exports.""
.. hmm, just realized that one was from "The Telegraph" and The Telegraph Group leans conservative ..
----
Moscow and Beijing concluded an energy pact that has been in the works for years. That's better news for China than for Russia.
BY Keith Johnson
MAY 21, 2014
Russia and China finally inked a huge energy deal Wednesday that will see Russia provide natural gas to the fast-growing market in China for the next 30 years. The agreement, coming just one day after a surprising and disappointing impasse cast a shadow on a much-touted visit by Russian president Vladimir Putin to Shanghai, caps a nearly two-decade odyssey in which both countries have sought to diversify their energy business.
The exact terms of the deal have not been made public, so it is hard to say exactly how much of a bargain China extracted from Russia, which is looking east for new export markets.
People close to the negotiations said that China had agreed to pay about $350 per thousand cubic meters, which is less than the roughly $380 per thousand cubic meters that Russia's Gazprom charges most customers in Europe. That would equate to around $10 per million British thermal units, roughly in line with the prices that Beijing sought during tough and protacted negotiations.
Gazprom, however, did not make public the pricing terms of the deal, which had been the sticking point since the two sides first began talking in the late 1990s and which as late as Tuesday remained contentious.
The deal calls for Russia to develop gas fields in eastern Siberia and ship 38 billion cubic meters of gas per year to the populous northeastern corner of China. Both sides could still apparently expand the deal to as much as 60 billion cubic meters of gas a year. The initial deal would supply about one-quarter of China's natural-gas demand today, but will only meet about 10 percent of China's gas demand in 2020, when the fields and pipelines are expected to be operational.
The Russia-China gas deal will give Moscow an alternative market for one of its main exports, and will help China meet part of its rapidly-growing demand for cleaner sources of energy. But it won't come at the expense of Russia's gas business with Europe. That's because the gas to supply China will come from different fields in Russia's Far East.
Still, in the next decade, it will give Russia a way to lessen its dependence on the slow-growing European gas market--and a way to take the sting out of future efforts by the West to use the energy weapon against Moscow.
As the Chinese market develops, it will offer Russia an alternative source of export revenues to complement its European business, which will make it more difficult for European countries to strike back at Moscow by reducing the amount of energy they buy. In the wake of Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the United States and the EU have sought to take advantage of Moscow's dependence on energy exports, which account for about half of Russia's federal revenue.
Alexey Druzhinin - AFP - Getty
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/05/21/russia_china_finally_ink_landmark_energy_deal
---
which suggests the headline .. "China Doesn't Back Russia's Invasion Of Crimea — And That's A Big Problem For Putin" was maybe a bit off the mark, or at least no really big deal ..
.. bit more from the one i am replying to ..
"The reality is that China is breaking Russia's control over the gas basins of Central Asia systematically and ruthlessly. Turkmenistan's gas used to flow North, hostage to prices set by Gazprom. It now flows East. President Xi went in person last September to open the new 1,800 km pipeline to China from the Galkynysh [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/us-gas-turkmenistan-galkynysh-idUSBRE9830MN20130904 ] field, the world's second largest with 26 trillion cubic meters.
It will ultimately supply 65 BCM, equal to half Gazprom's exports to Europe. Much the same is going on in Kazakhstan, where Chinese companies have taken over much of the energy industry. The politics are poignantly exposed in Wikileaks cables from Central Asia. A British diplomat is cited in a 2010 dispatch describing the "Chinese commercial colonization" of the region, saying Russia was "painfully" watching its energy domination in Central Asia slip away.
Yet more revealing is a cable quoting Cheng Guoping, China's ambassador to Kazakhstan, warning that Russia and China are on a collision course, and China will not be the one to yield. "In the future, great power relations in Central Asia will be complicated, delicate. The new oil and gas pipelines are breaking Russia's monopoly in energy exports.""
.. hmm, just realized that one was from "The Telegraph" and The Telegraph Group leans conservative ..
----
Moscow and Beijing concluded an energy pact that has been in the works for years. That's better news for China than for Russia.
BY Keith Johnson
MAY 21, 2014
Russia and China finally inked a huge energy deal Wednesday that will see Russia provide natural gas to the fast-growing market in China for the next 30 years. The agreement, coming just one day after a surprising and disappointing impasse cast a shadow on a much-touted visit by Russian president Vladimir Putin to Shanghai, caps a nearly two-decade odyssey in which both countries have sought to diversify their energy business.
The exact terms of the deal have not been made public, so it is hard to say exactly how much of a bargain China extracted from Russia, which is looking east for new export markets.
People close to the negotiations said that China had agreed to pay about $350 per thousand cubic meters, which is less than the roughly $380 per thousand cubic meters that Russia's Gazprom charges most customers in Europe. That would equate to around $10 per million British thermal units, roughly in line with the prices that Beijing sought during tough and protacted negotiations.
Gazprom, however, did not make public the pricing terms of the deal, which had been the sticking point since the two sides first began talking in the late 1990s and which as late as Tuesday remained contentious.
The deal calls for Russia to develop gas fields in eastern Siberia and ship 38 billion cubic meters of gas per year to the populous northeastern corner of China. Both sides could still apparently expand the deal to as much as 60 billion cubic meters of gas a year. The initial deal would supply about one-quarter of China's natural-gas demand today, but will only meet about 10 percent of China's gas demand in 2020, when the fields and pipelines are expected to be operational.
The Russia-China gas deal will give Moscow an alternative market for one of its main exports, and will help China meet part of its rapidly-growing demand for cleaner sources of energy. But it won't come at the expense of Russia's gas business with Europe. That's because the gas to supply China will come from different fields in Russia's Far East.
Still, in the next decade, it will give Russia a way to lessen its dependence on the slow-growing European gas market--and a way to take the sting out of future efforts by the West to use the energy weapon against Moscow.
As the Chinese market develops, it will offer Russia an alternative source of export revenues to complement its European business, which will make it more difficult for European countries to strike back at Moscow by reducing the amount of energy they buy. In the wake of Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the United States and the EU have sought to take advantage of Moscow's dependence on energy exports, which account for about half of Russia's federal revenue.
Alexey Druzhinin - AFP - Getty
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/05/21/russia_china_finally_ink_landmark_energy_deal
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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