[ad_1]
The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was fully completed on Friday morning, September 10, reported Gazprom in its official Telegram channel.
“At a morning operational meeting at PJSC Gazprom, Chairman of the Management Board Alexei Miller said that this morning at 8.45 Moscow time the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline has been fully completed,” the company said in a statement.
On September 6, the operator Nord Stream 2 AG announced the laying of the last pipe of the second string of the gas pipeline to the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Earlier, on September 2, the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the project would be launched in the very near future.
The completion of construction does not mean that Russia will immediately be able to start gas supplies via the new pipeline to Germany, notes Deutsche Welle. The project needs to go through serious certification procedures, which will take a lot of time. A model of gas transportation using the unbundling procedure should be operational.
This is a rule according to which a company that extracts or supplies gas does not have the right to transport it. Thanks to this condition, free competition is ensured on the EU gas market. Nord Stream 2 is owned by Gazprom and plans to pump gas through it. Thus, the new pipeline does not meet the criteria for the basic model of ownership unbundling.
European and German legislation provides for two other unbundling models: ISO (independent system operator) and ITO (independent transmission operator). The difference is that in the case of ISO, the operator does not own the pipe, whereas in the ITO model, he both manages and owns it. But both of these models are provided for by gas rules introduced for gas pipelines from third countries, built by May 2019. Nord Stream 2 is not like that, the newspaper notes. In any case, the Nord Stream 2 operator will have to fulfill a number of requirements in order to ensure independence from Gazprom.
Nord Stream 2 runs along the bottom of the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. The length of each line is 1.2 thousand km. 55 billion cubic meters will be delivered through it a year. m of gas. The US last year imposed sanctions on Nord Stream 2, which forced the Swiss contractor to abandon pipe-laying.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that Berlin will advocate for sanctions against Moscow if the Russian authorities use the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline as a weapon. According to her, the agreement on the supply of Russian gas through Ukraine, which expires in three years, should be extended.
[ad_2]
Source link
