Page 6 - EurOil Week 29 2019

EurOil PIPELINES & TRANSPORT EurOil
Gazprom optimistic about gaining Danish approval for Nord Stream-2 route
DENMARK
Russia’s Gazprom remains optimistic that its e orts to secure a green light from Denmark for plans to construct Nord Stream-2, a subsea natural gas pipeline that will connect Russia and Germany, will be successful.
In April of this year, the Nord Stream-2 con- sortium, which is headed by Gazprom, asked the Danish government to approve a new ver- sion of its route application. In the document, the state-controlled Russian gas giant outlines two proposals for routing a section of the pipe- line along the continental shelf of the Baltic Sea to the south-east of Bornholm Island.
Danish officials have not said how long they will take to consider the new application – or its predecessor, which Gazprom submit- ted last year. at document outlines the Nord Stream-2 group’s plans to lay pipe along the con- tinental shelf to the north-west of Bornholm.
Gazprom’s original request, submitted in 2017, called for a section of Nord Stream-2 to be built through Denmark’s territorial waters. It has received such a chilly reception that the Russian company nally informed Copenha- gen earlier this month that it was withdrawing its rst application, thereby leaving more room for consideration of the newer proposals.
Matthias Warnig, the CEO of the Nord Stream-2 consortium, asserted that this approach was more likely to be successful
because it did not involve Danish territorial waters.
e only factors that might sink the other proposals would be environmental and ship- ping risks, he commented in late June.
More recently, Gazprom has expressed opti- mism about its chances. Victor Zubkov, the chairman of the Russian state-owned natural gas monopoly, said last week that he expected the Danish government to take this step some- time in October. “I think they should give approval sometime in October and then we [will be able to] complete this very important project at the end of the year,” he said, according to RIA.
Gazprom and its partners had originally hoped to nish work on Nord Stream-2 before the end of 2019, but they may have di culty meeting this deadline. ey have already con- structed other sections of the pipe but must still wait for Denmark’s verdict.
If built, Nord Stream-2 will have a design capacity of 55bn cubic metres per year. It will complement the existing Nord Stream system, which began operating in 2012. e latter net- work is also able to handle 55 bcm per year. It has reduced Gazprom’s long-standing depend- ence on Ukrainian transit pipelines, as it does not pass through any third-party countries on the way to Germany.™
Gaz-System appoints contractor for Slovakia-Poland interconnector pipeline
POLAND
THE operator of the Polish natural gas trans- mission network has arranged to build a pipe- line that will connect Poland’s gas grid to that of Slovakia.
Gaz-System signed a contract worth about $137.6mn for the project last week. e other party to the contract is a consortium formed by three Polish companies: the Budimex construc- tion rm and two metallurgical out ts, Mostos- tal and Mostostal Krakow.
Under that contract, the parties will con- struct a 59-km pipeline from Strachocina, a town in the southern part of the country, to the border of Slovakia. e link will have a diameter of 1,000 mm and an operating pressure of 8.4 megapascals.
e new Polish pipeline will take 31 months to build, Budimex said. It is due to begin operat- ing a er the Baltic Pipe, which will pump 10bn
cubic metres per year of gas from Norway to Poland, is completed in 2022. e interconnec- tor will be able to operate in both directions, delivering up to 5.7 bcm per year to Slovakia and 4.7 bcm per year to Poland.
The government of Slovakia backs the project, and it has approved plans for the con- struction of a 106-km link that will serve as the country’s section of the interconnector. Eus- tream, the operator of Slovakia’s state gas com- pany, started construction work on this part of the pipeline in September 2016.
Artur Zawarto, the vice president of Gaz-System, said last week that the intercon- nector project would bene t Poland as a whole
– and also the sub-Carpathian region in par- ticular. e Polish government will be obligated
to divert a portion of its property tax revenues
to help fund infrastructure, he said. 
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 29 25•July•2019