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.
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These are all
industrial chemical components in strong
demand. Most important is the large
production of helium, a byproduct of natural
gas used in space industry, metallurgy,
medicine and other areas. Amur GPP will be
the largest helium production plant in the
world. Ethane, propane, butane,
pentane-hexane will be used to produce
polymers, plastics, lubricants and other
things
including motor fuel.
Regional Development
The
Amur GPP project when complete in 2025 will
be the largest gas processing plant complex
in Russia and second largest in the world,
bringing major new economic activity to the
underdeveloped Far East region, a priority
of the Russian government. In August 2017
Russian President Putin was present for the
first pouring of the concrete foundation for
the complex. In his remarks he noted that,
“In the past 50 years, our country has not
seen anything similar. Neither the Soviet
Union nor Russia have implemented projects
of this scale. This plant’s capacity will be
42 billion, which is a breakthrough not only
for the industry but also in the overall
development of the Russian Far East.”
Putin added,
“During peak periods, the construction will
require several thousand people, or almost
25,000 workers, to be more precise. Once the
plant is complete, it will employ 2,500 to
3,000 people, which will allow us not only
to move forward in gas production but also
to create conditions for building another
giant plant in the country and one of the
largest in the
world.” The
production from the Amur plant complex will
be marketed for export to the Asian market
as well as expanding the gas supply network
for Yakutia and the Amur Region where until
now commercial gas is almost non-existent.
The
strategic partner of Gazprom responsible for
the processing equipment and other
engineering technology is the German
company, Linde, a world leader in such
specialized technology.
The
Amur GPP complex will bring a major boost to
Svobodny which like many towns in the remote
Far East has been losing population
following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The construction phase as noted is employing
some 25,000 engineers and construction
workers, most drawn from the region, adding
a major economic boost. In addition Gazprom
is building 42 new apartment buildings and
36 townhouses for some 5,000 people in
Svobodny who will be permanently employed at
the facility. There will also be a new
school and kindergarten with a swimming
pool, clinic, sports and cultural
institutions. As well, Gazprom is
cooperating with Amur State University and
the Far Eastern Federal University, with new
courses to train future specialists in
chemical technology. The municipal
government is already benefiting from tax
payments from the presence of the project.
Pivot
east
Ironically, we can title this the ‘Biden
Memorial Pipeline.’ Had the Obama
Administration not launched their coup
d’etat in 2013 at Maidan Square in Kiev,
with the subsequent ouster of the elected
president in February 2014 in favor of
literal neo-nazi parties and corrupt
oligarchs under a US puppet regime, the
completion of the Power of Siberia pipeline
to China would likely not exist today.
Negotiations with Beijing for the pipeline
had been dragging on for more than ten years
when the Ukraine coup took place. After that
coup a final agreement was secured by Moscow
with Beijing in a matter of weeks as Putin
engineered a geopolitical pivot to the East
away from NATO.
Vice President
Joe Biden was named by Obama to oversee the
Ukraine coup and its aftermath, which
apparently included some corrupt sweetheart
deals for Hunter Biden and
possibly
Joe Biden with Ukraine gas company Burisma.
The coup,
carried out by then CIA head John Brennan,
using sniper mercenaries from neighboring
Georgia, together with neocon US State
Department official Victoria “F**k the EU”
Nuland, was one of the more foolish
geopolitical blunders of Washington in
recent decades. The pro-NATO coup was
initiated when Viktor Yanukovich’s
government had decided to accept generous
Russian terms to join her Eurasian Economic
Union rather than a vague promise of
possible EU membership candidate status.
Today Ukraine is treated with outcast status
by the EU, and its economy is a shambles as
a result of the break with Russia. In May,
2014, just weeks after the CIA toppled the
duly elected government of Viktor Yanukovich
in what Stratfor founder George Friedman
called, “…the most blatant coup in (US)
history,” Moscow signed the
agreement with
Beijing for the Gas Pipeline Deal of the
Century, the Power of Siberia.
F.
William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant
and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics
from Princeton University and is a
best-selling author on oil and geopolitics,
exclusively for the online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook.”
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