Putin and the ‘Biden Memorial Pipeline’ to China

By F. William Engdahl

December 18, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - In early 2014 Washington staged a blatant coup d’etat in Ukraine breaking the historic relationship with Russia and setting the stage for the subsequent NATO demonization of Russia. The one in charge for the Obama Administration of the Ukraine coup was then-Vice President Joe Biden. Today a bizarre Democrat impeachment attempt aimed at President Donald Trump has curiously enough put the spotlight on the dubious role that Joe Biden played in Ukraine affairs in 2014 and after. That Biden-steered coup had the unintended effect of causing a 180 degree geopolitical pivot of Moscow from West to East. The opening of a massive new gas pipeline now is only one of those unintended consequences.

On December 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin participated in the official opening of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline to Asia, servicing the growing China gas market. It met the planned deadline punctually, to the month. This marked the first Russian pipeline gas deliveries to China. In a videolink with China President Xi Jinping, Putin remarked, “This step is bringing Russian-Chinese strategic cooperation in energy to a whole new level.” Xi called it “a milestone project for the bilateral energy cooperation.”

The opening, a huge engineering feat, completes a pipeline through Russia’s Eastern Siberia north of Mongolia to the border with China, running more than 2,200 kilometers across Russia’s east territories. It is the largest gas pipeline project in the world to date.

The pipeline is designed to deal with temperatures as low as 62 C minus, and withstand earthquakes along its route. It begins in the Chayanda gas field in Yakutia and completes the Russian section at Blagoveshchensk on the Russia–China border. There, via two underwater pipelines under the Amur River, it connects with a Chinese gas line going south to Shanghai, the 3,371-kilometer-long Heihe–Shanghai pipeline in China. The world’s largest market demand increase for gas fuel in recent years has been China.

In May 2014, Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) signed a $400 billion 30-year agreement for gas to be supplied via the Power of Siberia gas pipeline. The Russian gas deliveries to China will be 38 billion cubic meters per year when it reaches peak in 2025. In 2018 China natural gas consumption was 280 bcm, so the Siberian contribution is significant. It will eventually supply some 10% of China’s total gas needs for electricity and heating, to China’s underdeveloped northeast regions and south as far as Shanghai. But the project is about much more than gas to China.

AMUR GPP

Completion of the major Power of Siberia pipeline to China involves more than a pipeline running through 2,200 kilometers of remote Russia. It is also being used as a catalyst to develop major industry in the economically underdeveloped Russian Far East as well, a priority of the Russian government in recent years.

A little discussed parallel development tied to the construction of the Power of Siberia pipeline is Gazprom’s decision to build Russia’s largest gas-processing chemical facility, the Amur Gas Processing Plant, or the Amur GPP. The Amur GPP is the largest construction project in Russia’s Far East, a $14 billion complex near Svobodny on the Zeya River in Amur Oblast, some 170 kilometers from the gas pipeline’s China connection point. The Amur GPP scale is enormous, the size of 1,100 football fields.

The complex will use a portion of the huge gas reserves of the Power of Siberia fields in East Siberia to produce a mix of petrochemicals that will include ethane, propane, butane, pentane-hexane fraction and 60 million cubic meters of helium annually.