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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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LNG can indeed be moved around like that.

After building facilities which I did mention. Which are expensive and no one built facilities to places with cheap Russian gas.

Like I literally said that so what was your point?

...via the pipelines and LNG facilities, which are long term projects.

As pipeline flows were closed, Russia hit a bottleneck in its shipping capacity by port, because they didn't have the infrastructure to simply take all the pipeline-gas and then push it through ports on top of the usual port-exports. Hence why they filled their storage to capacity and then started cutting production.

The Russian Deputy Prime Minister statement from February was a 25% reduction in gas exports by volume in 2022, blaming the loss of the Nord Stream Pipeline and European customers (who primarily bought via pipelines) shunning it, and stating that the solution was the eastern China route, which is itself a pipeline project.

Were LNG truly fungible in the way RandomRanger describes and sliders1234 contested, that wouldn't have happened. The Russian gas that used to go to Europe wasn't simply put on ships to India to be resold to the Europeans. It just didn't reach the market, beyond whatever surge capacity the Russians had beyond their normal sea-based LNG export capacity.

Rather, the Europeans paid premiums to buy the sea-based LNG that was typically exported for Asia, which has been a market the Russians aren't a major party in.