Projects

The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) AG announced to great fanfare on the very last day of this past year that gas has begun to flow from Azerbaijan to Greece, Bulgaria and Italy.

Fortuna, the Russian pipe-laying vessel, has successfully completed the 2,6-km section of the Nord Stream 2 subsea gas pipeline in German territorial waters and is traveling to the Hanseatic German port of Wismar. The parent Nord Stream AG in Zug, Switzerland, said the ship will resume construction of the pipeline in Danish territorial waters by mid January.

Undeterred by the threat of punitive sanctions if work on Nord Stream 2 resumes, the construction of the last hundred plus meters of the gas pipeline on the seabed of the Baltic picked up again after a one year hiatus.

The Pipeline Technology Journal (PTJ) has made several references the past weeks to European pipeliners looking into the possibility of transporting hydrogen through the existing network of gas pipelines crisscrossing Europe.

Keystone XL, first proposed over 12 years ago and given little chance for completion with the incoming and generally anti - fossil fuel Joe Biden administration, is pulling out all the stops in one last ditch effort to make its ultimate demise politically impossible. 

Despite Covid-19, The Shell Pipeline Co., has almost completed a project to better protect drinking water supplies along the Falcon Ethane Pipeline.

Den Norske Veritas - Germanischer Lloyd (DNV GL), the acclaimed international accredited registrar and classification society headquartered in Norway and frequent and valuable participant in the annual Berlin Pipeline Technology Conference, has announced that it has had to stop working on Nord Stream 2 under the threat of US sanctions.

Western Australia gets the go-ahead for the construction of a 580 km pipeline, costing $460 million, which will connect the Western Perth onshore gas production basin with mining customers in the Midwestern and goldfields regions of Western Australia.

Against all odds Nordstream 2, which for the past nearly 12 months looked as if it was literally dead in the water, is scheduled to resume construction on the last 120-km of the disputed pipeline on 5 December.

In yet another move by the US government to prevent the 120-km pipe-laying completion of Nord Stream 2 on the floor of the Baltic, sanctions have been included  in the annual U.S. defense policy bill.

BP has begun natural gas production from its Qattameya gas field in the East Nile Delta offshore Egypt.

Open Grid Europe has announced that its newly completed Zeelink gas pipeline will be tested in November and is expected to become operational, in spite of Covid restrictions as soon as March 2021. This 600-million-euro pipeline is the fruition of a joint venture between Open Grid Europe GmbH (OGE, 75 percent) and Thyssengas GmbH (25 percent).

Calgary-based integrated energy company Husky Energy has been forced to temporarily shut one of its north-western Albertan pipelines in response to a pipeline incident in low-lying wetland some 15 km south-east of Rainbow Lake.

Over the past year, as pipeline company after pipeline company yielded to the threat of proposed U.S.sanctions on European companies participating in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Russian President Vladimir Putin was calmly biding his time, saying that if the Europeans pull out his own pipe laying vessel, the Akademik Cherskiy, would enter the

Norwegian-based oil and gas major Equinor, has awarded British- based engineering services provider TechnipFMC ,with an engineering, procurement, construction and installation contract for the North Sea Breidablikk Pipelay project, located near the existing Grane platform off the coast from Stavanger, west Norway’s capital of oil.