Page 54 - BNE_magazine_12_2019 dec19

54 I Eastern Europe bne December 2019
Denmark gave Russia’s Gazprom permission to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline through its territorial waters, clearing the last obstacle to its construction.
Denmark greenlights Nord Stream 2 construction in its waters
bne IntelliNews
After months of bitter wrangling, the government of Denmark gave the go-head for Russia’s Gazprom to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline through its territorial waters – the last country on the route between Russia and Germany to grant construction permissions.
The announcement comes after president Vladimir Putin talked to German Chancellor Angela Merkel
on October 30 and suggested making
a “package deal” that links the disputed payment of $3bn award by Gazprom
to Ukraine together with a temporary transit deal for Russian gas via Ukraine to its European customers.
The Danish Energy Agency (DEA)
said on October 30 it had issued
a permit allowing Russia's state-owned Gazprom to lay a 147-km section of the pipeline through Denmark’s exclusive
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economic zone, southeast of the island of Bornholm.
The decision comes as a victory for Gazprom, which has been lobbying the government but the fight has delayed the completion of construction, as
the pipeline was due to come online at the start of 2020 to give Russia an alternative export route that would have allowed it to bypass Ukraine, with whom a gas transit deal expires on January 1, 2020.
The delay in the completion of Nord Stream 2 means that Russia needs to negotiate a temporary transit deal with Ukraine for 2020, but as bne IntelliNews reported talks are going nowhere. Gazprom met with Ukraine’s national gas company Naftogaz in Brussels, to try and negotiate a new transit deal, in a meeting that ended in the trading of barbed remarks on Gazprom’s failure
to pay Naftogaz $3bn awarded to it as damages by an arbitration court in Stockholm.
Russia is eager to defend and expand its share of Europe’s gas market in the face of EU efforts to diversify supply. It also comes as a blow to the US, which has fiercely opposed Nord Stream 2 while promoting its own LNG as an alternative source of gas for Europe. Washington has sought to impose sanctions on the project, which even if enacted are likely to come too late to make an impact.
Gazprom secured all other necessary permits to run Nord Stream 2 through Russian, Swedish, Finnish and German waters more than a year ago. It first filed applications with Danish authori- ties back in 2017. With more than 2,100 km of its 2,400 km of pipes now in place, Gazprom may still have enough time to complete Nord Stream 2 by the