LNG is just as capital intensive as pipelines, and creates supply chaines that are as rigid, for the same reasons - all the investment is upfront and can only be repaid onver long periods, thus requiring very long, very constraining contracts.

A LNG production facility needs a dedicated LNG regaz facility on the other side, and dedicated LNG tankers (committed to the route between the two) for 20-25 years, and the contracts that formalize that.

It is true that you can reroute a LNG tanker to another destination if you make a profit doing so (shared usually between the seller and the committed buyer), but that's not quite enough to create a liquid market: first of all, the trade unit size is a cargo, ie 100-200 million cubic meters (at current prices: $50-60 million), and the players can only be parties to existing contracts, and holders of capacity in existing terminals.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

It seems like it would be far more prudent for EU governments to subsidize domestic alternatives, so that the EU isn't as dependent on Russian gas.

and who wants to build that infrastructure?

when they know in 20-30 years it'll be obsolete and redundant?

this is the cognitive dissonance that the general public hasn't clued in on yet.

but they will...by process of elimination.

the choices reduce and highlight better the contrast. so damn stark when you stare into it:

left....energy independence, a serious, sustainable infrastructure planned and built to last much longer than a couple of decades, or right, the delirium of berlusconi's 1000 new nuke plants, endless subservience to autocratic fossil fuel distribution bottlenecks, (with ever higher body counts), cops on every corner.

you'd have to be a fully corrupted, paid-off masochist, or an imbecile to think we should take the latter.

yet that's what it's coming down to. and the media will be the last to know, because they're so well paid not to... meanwhile our leaders take us out further on the rotting limb...

how long can they blithely continue to call up down?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty