Will halt gas pipeline if Russia wages war: US President Joe Biden

The $11.6-billion Nord Stream 2 can carry 151 million cubic metres of gas a day

US President Joe Biden said the controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany would be stopped if President Vladimir Putin orders an invasion of Ukraine.

“We will bring an end to it,” Biden said at a joint news conference at the White House on Monday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a short answer to a question about whether he had received assurances from Scholz. “The notion that Nord Stream 2 is going to go forward with an invasion by the Russians — that’s not going to happen.”

The $11-billion gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea, owned by Russia’s state-backed energy giant Gazprom, runs from western Siberia to Germany, doubling the capacity of the already-in-use Nord Stream 1 pipeline. The pipeline could heat 26 million German homes at an affordable price and construction was completed in September 2021.

Scholz, who has tended to play up the urgency for diplomacy with Russia, warned about the potential price to the Kremlin, but stopped short of specifically mentioning the pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine and has been a point of contention within his coalition. 

He was pressed on whether he would commit to sanctioning Nord Stream 2. The new German leader switched to English to make plain that there was no daylight between Germany and its allies. He made no effort to dispel Biden’s pledge that the pipeline would be stopped.

“We are acting together, we are absolutely united — and we will not take different steps,” Scholz said. “We will do the same steps, and they will be very, very hard to Russia, and they should understand.”

The chancellor later underscored those comments, saying Germany is “ready to take steps that will have costs for us,” Scholz said in an interview with CNN.

European natural gas rose on Tuesday after Biden’s warning and as Russian flows through a key route declined. Dutch front-month gas futures rose as much as 4.3 per cent to 83 euros a megawatt-hour and traded 1.4 per cent higher in the day in Amsterdam.