The United States are Late with the Nord Stream 2 Hampering

Efforts by the U.S. Senate to hamper a controversial natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany have probably come too late. The Senate is yet to vote on a bill to impose sanctions on construction of the undersea part of the Nord Stream 2 link under the Baltic Sea, but the project is already almost complete and scheduled to be finished this year, Bloomberg reports. The faltering U.S. attempt to prevent the pipeline mimics similarly unsuccessful moves to limit Soviet gas exports to Europe during the Reagan era in the early 1980s, according to Jonathan Stern, a senior research fellow at Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “They were resisted and ineffective then and I think we can expect the same result today,” he said. “This all looks likely to be too late to be very significant since most of these pipelines have already been laid, unless the U.S. attempts retroactive sanctions, which I think could really raise a storm on this side of the Atlantic.” It’s not so much that this year’s attempts by the senators will stop the project, but there “might be a bit of disruption,” said Wayne Bryan, a trader and analyst at Alfa Energy Ltd. in London. Gas prices for 2020 in the Netherlands are 55% higher than for delivery next month, signaling the market’s assessment of heightened supply risk next year. The U.S. bill provides for sanctions on ships involved in pipeline construction, as well as restrictions on company executives associated with these vessels. We remind that Gazprom previously reported that the Nord Stream 2 AG has already laid 1,739 km of gas pipelines, which is about 71% of its total length along two lines. Vesti finance