Two small UK-EU gas pipelines are a big vulnerability
Tom KirkmanIndependent Project Manager
Intiguing insight into 2 small (but key) natural gas pipelines between the UK and EU.
If these 2 nat gas pipeline go *KABOOM* in a similar way that the 2 Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up, EU (and UK) will be in big trouble.
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“The chances are you haven’t heard of the BBL pipeline.
It’s a 235 km steel tube which runs under the North Sea between Balgzand in the northern tip of the Netherlands and Bacton in Great Britain.
… Indeed, BBL has already played a silent but essential role in the Ukraine war and, for that matter, the fate of Europe, because this is one of the two main pipelines transporting gas between the UK and Northern Europe.
Actually, BBL is the smaller of the two pipes, the other of which is the rather unimaginatively-named “Interconnector” pipe.
But the reason it’s worth focusing on BBL is because in the past few days something rather interesting happened there.
… Over the past year, a stupendous amount of LNG has been coming into UK ports, drawn in by the stupendously high gas price, from where it has been transferred across the UK’s pipeline network and thence into the European system.
To put this into perspective, in the four summers since 2017, the average amount of natural gas transferred from the UK was around 5.7 trillion cubic metres.
This past summer the total was 20.5 trillion cubic metres.
… Much of the gas which replenished the storage facilities in Europe, which should help them survive the coming winter while keeping homes heated, despite the absence of Russian gas, came via the UK – via the BBL and Interconnector pipelines.
And that’s actually understating it, because those pipelines were only so wide, and so could only carry a certain proportion of the LNG flowing into the UK, but what also happened this summer is that UK gas power plants went into overdrive, burning that gas and turning it into electricity, which was also fed via undersea cables into Europe.
… But in recent weeks those flows have begun to drop, which brings us to the interesting thing that changed in the past few days.
For the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the extraordinary rollercoaster in the gas market, a small quantity of natural gas begun to flow back into the UK.
… But there is also a scarier question: what if the market doesn’t function, because of political interference?
What if European nations decide that storage in, say Germany (or for that matter the European Union) cannot leave?
Where does that leave the UK, which tends to rely on those pipeline flows from Europe in the event of a cold snap.
The short answer is that no-one really knows. What we do know is that this story isn’t over yet. Gas prices are already eye-wateringly high, especially when you consider that the Government is effectively subsidising them. It’s not implausible that they get even higher.”