Germany Leaves Its Natural Gas in the Ground
The country can’t say it wasn’t warned about overreliance on Russia for energy
Regarding Walter Russell Mead’s “Germans See Affluence Ahead” (Global View, Oct. 18) and Joseph Sternberg’s “Germany Finally Says the F-Word: ‘Fracking’” (Political Economics, Oct. 7): My firm’s geologists had researched European shale resources. We estimated that, with fracking, Europe had about 700 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, enough to power the continent for 50 years. I was asked to present this information to the energy-security-policy leadership (Energie Sicherheitsführung) of the German parliament in April 2006.
At the time Germany was already planning to expand its gas pipelines to Russia. That natural gas cost around $17 per million British thermal units, compared with a cost of $3 at home. I asked the leaders to imagine the positive effects of being able to power their economy from local resources and in that price range. Their faces showed stunned disbelief. As one of their Ph.D.s explained in German: “A Halliburton truck fracking on a German hill? Never, never!”
Following the meeting, they budgeted the princely sum of 300,000 euros to study what I had presented, but they decided to stick with the pipelines. The Germans can’t say they weren’t warned.