Russian Oil and Gas Industry: News #3

Come on, GarryB. Buy low and sell high is the very heart of business.

Contracts are the happy medium where both sides best serve their interests. The problem is that energy is so political in the modern era.

The greens have promised that the transition to the renewable utopia will be free. It's not. But they won't take the blame when things go awry. They will blame the Russian bear. I'm not saying that's right. It's just the way it is.

lancelot wrote:The SMR reactors are another scam and haven't been built or in operation anywhere in the world.

lancelot wrote:

. Rosatom is using these reactors in far away locations in the Arctic where other forms of power are not as viable. It is quite different from proposing to use these in urban centers. Let alone in the dozens.

That's blowing hot air, but not a scam. It's dirty politics. If there is a scam it is that the politicians have overpromised the virtues of trying to rapidly transform their economies away from fossil fuels.

Ok, I agree with you here. It's not just the greens. It's a whole coalition of vested interests and includes security state hawks and such too. I think we can agree on that.

Those are different. When you are looking to construct a powerplant in remote locations such as middle-of-nowhere, Siberia, you can put down the costs to ship and assemble all the materials (rebar, concrete, miles of various cabling, steel beams, fabricated components, etc.) and the supporting infrastructure there (housing, transportation to the site, and amenities for the construction workforce), or you can build it in an already equipped shipyard and simply tow it to the site when it's finished.

It's a good idea, even if it is for niche applications.

Karl Haushofer wrote:This reminds me of what happened today in Finland. Finnish president Sauli Niinistö met with Vladimir Putin for the first time in two years.

One of the things that was discussed was timber trade between Russia and Finland. Finnish forest industry is currently quite dependent on timber imports from Russia because Russian timber is very cheap compared to Finnish timber. Finnish forest owners sell timber with very high price compared to imports from Russia.

Importing timber from Russia has also been lucrative for Finnish companies because Russia doesn’t require forestry companies to re-plant the forests that they cut. In Finland the companies that cut forests have to do the re-planting that costs a lot of money. So these companies save a lot of money when they go to Russia and just cut the forest, take the timber to Finland and then leave. These companies have been treating Russian Karelia as their colony and basically raping Russian forests for the last 30 years or so.

But in 2020 the Russian government made a decision that by 2022 Russia will prohibit exporting Russian timber abroad. With this decision the Russian government wanted to help to develop forest industry in Russia. This would also mean big troubles for these Finnish companies. So Russia received a lot of negative publicity because of this.

Last month Russian government started make preparations for this. The Saimaa canal which connects the Gulf of Finland to Finnish river network is used to transport Russian timber to Finland. It is a cheap and efficient way to transport Russian timber here. The Russian government announced that in a near future transport of timber out of Russia will be prohibited in Saimaa canal. This announcement caused a lot of anger in Finnish press.

But today – according to the Finnish press – president Putin promised Niinistö that he will talk to Russian officials to have this decision reversed because Putin doesn’t want to see Finnish industry suffer.

This would great news for my country Finland that can continue to rape Russian forests, but oh man… what a moron this man is! I mean Putin! I don’t know why does he have this very odd, very strange desire to make goodwill gestures to countries that more or less openly detest him and Russia. Does he think he will get something in return? Does he think that these countries will like him more? If so, he is truly in idiot. These gestures are not seen as anything else than stupidity and weakness, and quite rightly so.

Now let’s see if Russian officials and government are strong enough to resist Putin. I believe that there are many good people in Russian government who have a great desire to develop Russia. I can also imagine that many of them are getting increasingly tired of Putin.