BASF is the world’s largest chemical company, and, as former German lawmaker Hans-Josef Fell pointed out, it makes the building blocks for a vast quantity and range of products for the global market.
Trouble in Germany tends not to just stay in Germany. “If the shutdown was only a few days, it wouldn’t matter too much, but if they shut down for a month or even more, then they would really be in trouble.” “The government would have to shut down the supply to big industrial consumers, and definitely BASF will be one of those,” said professor Stefan Lechtenboehmer of the Wuppertal Institute. But under German law, if the country has to ration its reserves, homes and hospitals will get priority. Its main plant at Ludwigshafen, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, uses as much gas as the whole of Switzerland. It would be really difficult for German manufacturers and especially for one company: The chemical giant BASF needs a continuous supply of vast quantities of natural gas, both as a source of energy and as a raw material. “A really cold winter will be really difficult to deal with - no doubt about it.” Then there will not be enough natural gas,” said Ole Hvalbye, an energy analyst with the SEB bank in Oslo, Norway. “If this will be a really cold winter, we will have a substantial problem. There remains a lot at stake since the country’s all-important manufacturing industry would bear the brunt of any shortages, which are still a possibility. Confidence has been growing that Europe’s industrial powerhouse may get through the winter relatively unscathed by the loss of Russian energy.īut everything depends on the severity of the winter. But since the Kremlin began choking off supplies, the Germans have turned to other gas producers, built up their reserves and sharply reduced their use of this fuel. "It's time to get these rusty relics out of our ocean," Kristen Monsell, legal director of the Center's Oceans program, said in a press release, comparing the aging oil platforms to "ticking time bombs.Germany once relied on Russia for around half of its natural gas. Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in federal court, claiming the Biden administration was improperly allowing rigs in the oilfield off Huntington Beach to continue operating under outdated safety plans devised in the 1970s and 1980s.
In August, Amplify Energy and two of its subsidiaries pleaded guilty to negligently discharging oil and agreed to pay nearly $13 million in criminal fines and cleanup fees.Īmplify also said it had reached a settlement with businesses and property owners claiming spill-related losses.Īmplify contends that the pipeline had been damaged by the anchors of container ships nine months before the spill, and that it had not been properly notified. At least 25,000 gallons of crude oil gushed from the broken pipe last October, forcing a weeklong closure of beaches along the Orange County coast in October and a months-long shutdown of fisheries. The pipeline runs from a plant in Long Beach to the Elly platform in federal waters off Huntington Beach.
Army Corps of Engineers has granted it a permit to remove and replace damaged segments of the pipeline, a job that is estimated to take about a month.
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