ENVIRONMENT-EUROPE: Gas Pipeline Threatens Fragile Marine Ecosystems

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

HAMBURG, Germany, Jun 21 2006 (IPS) - The North European Gas pipeline (NEGP), a Russian-German joint venture to deliver Russian natural gas to Europe in 2010, will destroy rich and fragile marine ecosystems along the Polish and German coastlines, prominent environmental activists say.

The only way the pipeline’s official 2008 start date for construction can be met is “if national and international environmental standards that similar projects have to fulfil are not respected,” Jochen Lamp, head of WWF’s Baltic project office in Hamburg, told IPS.

The NEGP, a 2,100-kilometre pipeline designed to convey gas from the western Siberian fields of Jushno Russkoje to Lubmin in northeastern Germany, will involve the ploughing of some 60 million cubic metres of seabed along the German coast and the Baltic Sea, and the installation of more than 1.3 million tonnes of steel tubes in the fragile mud flats along the German and Polish seashores.

“The NEGP will mean ploughing up to four metres deep and 30 metres wide of seabed through hundreds of kilometres in the fragile mud flats off the northeastern German coastline and across the Baltic Sea, posing an incalculable danger to spawning areas for many marine species, such as herring, and to important biotopes,” Lamp said.

The pipeline will also cut across the Greifswalder Bodden (Bay of Greifswald), a protected area in Germany that is a breeding area for many bird species, and also through still unexplored parts of the Baltic Sea, along the Swedish and Finnish coasts.

Lamp said that the NEGP represented a double danger for these ecosystems, because the Russian-German consortium planned to build the pipeline in two phases, thus repeating damaging construction activities twice.

He also noted that projects comparable to the NEGP which long ago applied for authorisation to build similar facilities in the Baltic Sea are still awaiting approval by the German government.

For instance, the Baltic Gas Interconnector, a German-Danish-Swedish joint venture, presented its project to German and European Union environmental authorities in 2001, and is still waiting for their go-ahead. Other projects, such as the installation of wind turbines in the same mud flats that the NEGP is supposed to cross, also take years to fulfil bureaucratic controls and studies.

In the case of the NEGP, no environmental impact study has been carried out so far.

“The Russian-German consortium has not even applied for such a study or for approval from the German authorities,” Lamp said. “Therefore, the official schedule, to start pipeline construction in 2008 and deliver gas by 2010, can only be met if minimum environmental standards are violated.”

For NEGP spokesperson Jens Mueller, such apprehensions are misplaced. “There will be an impact study and application. The pipeline will satisfy all national and international environmental standards,” Mueller said.

Mueller added that the NEGP “has a precise schedule. We do not see reasons to deviate from it.”

The Russian-German gas pipeline, a joint venture between the Moscow-based Gazprom, the Germany-based Wintershall – a subsidiary of chemical giant BASF – and the German energy provider E.ON, has been a focus of controversy since its very conception in late 2005.

Gazprom is Europe’s main supplier of natural gas, and already delivers some 550 billion cubic metres of gas per year to the countries of the European Union. The NEGP will increase these deliveries, accentuating Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.

Since the Russian-Ukrainian crisis in early 2006, which led to the temporary suspension of gas deliveries to Kiev, European dependence on Russian gas has been a cause for worry in Berlin and other EU capitals, where officials have pointed to the need to diversify energy sources.

For Roland Goetz, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), “The NEGP will not increase German energy security, especially if compared to its alternatives, the expansion of existing continental pipelines.”

“These pipelines from Russia to Western Europe have proven secure and can easily be expanded,” Goetz wrote in a study for his Institute in September 2005. The SWP serves as a think-tank of the German Foreign Office.

The NEGP project was personally approved on Sept. 8, 2005 by then German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Vladimir Putin, the Russian head of state. Schroeder’s direct participation in the approval of the NEGP was particularly criticised, because it was one of his government’s very last decisions, before he left office after the Sept. 18, 2005 parliamentary elections.

Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party lost the elections to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) by a thin margin.

The controversy heated up when Schroeder was named member of the board of directors of the NEGP, a few weeks after he handed over power to his CDU rival Angela Merkel.

At the time, many German political personalities saw Schroeder’s nomination to the NEGP boards of directors as a flagrant form of influence peddling. But despite the controversy and accusations against him, Schroeder accepted the position.

The NEGP has also caused political turmoil in Poland, where Ryszard Schnepf, foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, was forced to resign, after having stated that Poland would approve the pipeline.

The government in Warsaw has called the NEGP “a threat to national energy security and the environment.” But in an interview early this month with the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Schnepf said Marcinkiewicz would approve the pipeline if Poland were invited to participate in the Russian-German joint venture, and if a Polish representative would be named to the NEGP board of directors.

Marcinkiewicz later denied this possibility, and called for Schnepf’s immediate resignation.

The NEGP represents an additional environmental danger, for it will cut across sea regions infested with mines and chemical weapons from both the first and second world wars.

Although official German maps identify 14 sites along Germany’s northeastern coast where there are conventional and chemical munitions, there is no precise knowledge of how many weapons are buried in the Baltic Sea.

Despite all the dangers to the environment, WWF is not opposed to the gas pipeline. “As a source of energy, from an environmental viewpoint gas is preferable to oil. In addition, pipelines are technically feasible projects, as long as environmental standards are strictly respected,” said Lamp.