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LPG as the energy source of the future?
Chiara SchlenzEditor News
“Switzerland has to shiver”, “blackout planning”, “heating police”. The Russian war of aggression in Ukraine has caused fear in Europe – and also in Switzerland. Not only because of the war, but also because of the lack of Russian gas supplies to the EU.
But fears of a cold winter and empty gas storage facilities have not yet materialized in Europe. In January 2023, EU gas storage facilities were 81.7 percent full, European Council data shows. Good news for Switzerland, which mainly gets its gas from EU countries.
And not only that: Dependence on Russian pipeline gas was also significantly reduced in 2022 – last year the share of Russian gas fell from 30 to 10 percent. “On the one hand, consumption has been reduced, on the other hand, new procurement options have been opened up,” explains Christian Opitz (41), an energy expert at the University of St. Gallen. One of these new possibilities: liquefied natural gas, also known as LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas).
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LNG more agile than pipeline gas
A decisive advantage of LNG is the form of transport. Conventional gas has to be transported from A to B in laboriously built pipelines, while LNG is shipped agilely across the world’s oceans on large tankers that can dock anywhere there is an LNG terminal. No wonder LNG terminals are springing up like mushrooms in Europe. In Germany alone, the terminal in Wilhelmshaven was built within a few months, and six more are already being planned. And terminals are also being planned diligently in Italy, France and Great Britain.
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Even though gas imports from Russia have been severely curtailed, 13 percent of European LNG imports still come from there. This means that Russia, together with the USA and Qatar, is one of the largest LNG exporters. Hans Poser (55), energy consultant at Finadvice, explains: “A loss of gas supply via a pipeline means a loss of sales for Russia. For liquefied natural gas, on the other hand, there is an international market.”
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LNG – controversial rescue from the gas crisis
So far, so good – right? Not quite, warns Ganna Gladkykh, a sustainable energy expert at the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA). LNG brings with it a multitude of problems for the climate. Among other things, with LNG there is a higher risk of “methane slip”, i.e. unburned methane escaping into the atmosphere. In addition, Gladkykh fears that LNG will establish itself as a “more sustainable option to pipeline gas” – even though the emission reductions amount to only 10 percent, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a report.
A current analysis by the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), which was published at the world climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, also comes to the conclusion that too much infrastructure for LNG supply is currently being built worldwide. According to the data, the foreseeable oversupply of LNG could reach around 500 megatons as early as 2030. This corresponds to almost five times the amount of Russian gas imported by the EU in 2021.
Yes, according to Finadvice’s Poser: “New LNG terminals are now being planned in such a way that they can also process green ammonia or hydrogen. In this way they support the energy transition.» Because hydrogen can be fed into the gas network through methanation. And Poser emphasizes: “Without the newly built LNG terminals, Europe cannot – at least in the short term – be supplied with sufficient energy.”