德国的天然气窘境

德国的天然气窘境

这个故事很老，并有多种形式。格林兄弟两个世纪前制作的童话版本讲述了德国中部哈茨山脉的某个牧羊人卡尔·卡茨。一天晚上，一只误入歧途的山羊将Katz深深地带入一个洞穴。在陌生人的诱惑下，他喝了药水就睡着了。醒来后，他发现不是几个小时，而是几年过去了。他周围的世界变了。

Katz感到的困惑，被现在许多德国所认同。几年前，欧洲最富有的国家陷入了一种不太沉睡，而是梦游的状态。德国人因自己的经济和外交方面的成功而重新统一并平静下来，他们坚信他们的系统正在接近完美地运作。政府政策的指导与其说是务实主义，不如说是自欺欺人，因为领导人让选民以最小的摩擦，当然还有零排放，喋喋不休地谈论永久繁荣。

在俄罗斯坦克驶入附近的乌克兰并发出巨响声中，被叫醒显得非常难受。在某些方面，德国发现自己所处的世界不像Katz那样过去了几年时间，而是过去了几十年的时间。广阔的世界大部分地区没有在高速公路上走向自由民主，而是滑入了德国人记忆深刻的丑陋的民粹主义。德国没有享受和平合作的时代，而是发现枪支和士兵——包括美国的枪支和士兵——突然又回来了。事实证明，德国的繁荣不仅取决于其人民的勤奋，如令人振奋的童话版本，还依赖于廉价的便携式能源和人力。当然，那个善良的弗拉基米尔·普京（Vladimir Putin）用礼物包装了整条充满天然气的管道，他，原来是一只狼。

简而言之，多年的自满让德国陷入了窘境。然而，即使建制派接受了其困境的规模，以及改变方向的巨大挑战，德国与自己的对话仍然奇怪地狭隘，缺乏紧迫性。更奇怪的是，在一个以民主的开放性为荣的国家，未能搞清楚哪里出了问题。是的，一些公众人物因通过玫瑰色镜片看俄罗斯而受到正确的责骂。但几乎没有人系统性地探讨为什么普京先生能持续欺骗德国而德国能故意保持失明的状态。似乎没有人想谈论“在洞穴里”发生了什么。

以德国对俄罗斯燃料的可悲依赖为例。这不仅是因为普京先生以低价引诱企业和政治家，因此将俄罗斯在德国天然气消费中的份额从二十年前的30%提高到55%。还决定减少其他来源的能源供应。在这种愚蠢的许多例子中，最著名的是核能。2011年，当海啸袭击福岛的日本核反应堆时，时任总理安格拉·默克尔的政府在一夜之间关闭了德国一半的核发电能力。它为2022年12月的最后三家工厂设定了截止日期，随着严重的能源短缺迫在眉睫，这一目标直到现在才受到质疑。一个有动机的妥协方案反映了德国政治中特别缺乏紧迫性：呼吁绿党放弃关闭反应堆的坚持，以换取他们的自由联盟伙伴放弃对高速公路速度限制的反对。

然而，也许德国自己的最大目标是反对自己的天然气行业的开发。德国人缺乏邻国荷兰人的运气，自1959年以来，荷兰人巨大的，从德国从边境骑自行车即可抵达的格罗宁根油田，已经生产了价值约5000亿美元的汽油（允许这家报纸在1977年创造“荷兰病”一词）。但德国自己的储备也并非微不足道。在千年之交，德国每年生产约200亿立方米（bcm）的天然气，足以满足近四分之一的全国需求。但是，尽管地质学家认为德国至少拥有800亿亿亿可开采天然气，但产量并没有增长，而是断崖式下跌，仅为5-60亿立方米，仅相当于从俄罗斯进口的10%。

原因很简单。地质学规定，几乎所有德国的天然气只能通过水力压裂提取，但德国公众对水力压裂持非理性的恐惧。不仅仅是一种恐惧：2017年，默克尔女士的政府通过了一项法律，基本上禁止商业水力压裂，尽管德国公司自20世纪50年代以来一直在该国使用该技术，而且没有一起报道的严重环境破坏事件。

公众恐惧的原因并不难找到。2008年，美国大型石油公司埃克森美孚提议在德国北部的一个地点扩大水力压裂的使用。随着环保主义者涌入抗议，越来越有影响力的绿党也加入了抗议。亲克里姆林宫的频道《今日俄罗斯》也是如此，它大声警告水力压裂会导致辐射、婴儿先天缺陷、激素失衡、大量甲烷和有毒废物的释放以及鱼类种群中毒。在一次国际会议之前，普京本人也成为了一位专家，他宣布，水力压裂会从厨房的水龙头中喷出黑色粘性。

德国人似乎确实喜欢童话故事。“最终，我们放弃了解释水力压裂是绝对安全的尝试，”主要政府地球科学咨询机构前负责人Hans-Joach- im Kümpel叹了口气。“我真的不能责怪那些没有地下地质地位的人，如果他们听到的只是恐怖故事的话。”

德国天然气生产商表示，如果有机会，有了今天更清洁、更安全的新水力压裂方法，他们可以在短短18-24个月内将产量翻一番。在这个水平上，德国可能持续生产天然气到下个世纪。这将每年削减约150亿美元的进口。这不是童话故事。

Charlemagne

Let the sleeper awaken

Germans have been living in a dream

The story is old and takes many forms. A fairy-tale version, recorded two centuries ago by the Brothers Grimm, tells of a certain Karl Katz, a goatherd in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. One night a straying goat leads Katz deep into a cave. Tempted by strange men, he drinks a potion and falls asleep. On waking he finds that not hours, but years have passed. The world around him has changed.

The bewilderment felt by Katz is now shared by many Ger- mans. Some years ago Europe’s richest country slipped into a state not quite of slumber, but of sleep-walking. Newly reunited and lulled by their own economic and diplomatic success, Germans settled into a comfortable belief that their system was working near-perfectly. Governmental policies came to be guided less by pragmatism than by self-deception, as leaders plied voters with intoxicating talk of perpetual prosperity with minimal friction and, of course, zero emissions.

The awakening, to the sound of Russian tanks grinding into nearby Ukraine, has been rude. In some ways Germany finds itself not, like Katz, years in the future, but decades in the past. Instead of cruising on an Autobahn towards liberal democracy, much of the wider world has skidded into ugly kinds of populism that Germans recall all too well. Rather than enjoying an era of peaceful co-operation, Germany is finding that guns and soldiers—including American ones—are suddenly back in demand. German prosperity turns out to rely not solely on the industriousness of its people, as in the cheering fairy-tale version, but also on cheap im- ported energy and manpower. And of course that nice Vladimir Putin, who gift-wrapped whole pipelines full of natural gas, turns out to be a wolf.

Put simply, years of complacency have landed Germany in a pickle. Yet even as the establishment comes to terms with the scale of its dilemma, and with the immense challenge of changing course, Germany’s conversation with itself remains strangely parochial and lacking in urgency. Even more odd, in a country that prides itself on the openness of its democracy, is the failure to ac- count for what went awry. Yes, some public figures have rightly been scolded for looking at Russia through rose-tinted lenses. But the systemic nature of Mr Putin’s deceptions and of Germany’s wilful blindness have hardly been explored. No one seems to want to talk about what happened “in the cave”.

Consider Germany’s woeful dependence on Russian fuels. This came about not only because Mr Putin seduced businesses and politicians with low prices, so boosting Russia’s share of Germany’s natural-gas consumption from 30% two decades ago to a 55% chokehold. Decisions were also taken to shrink the supply of energy from other sources. Among numerous examples of such foolishness, the best-known concerns nuclear power. When a tsunami hit the Japanese nuclear reactors at Fukushima in 2011, the government of then-chancellor Angela Merkel flippte aus, shut- ting down half of Germany’s nuclear generation capacity virtually overnight. It set a closing date for the last three plants of December 2022, a target that is only now being questioned, as crippling pow- er shortages loom. Reflecting the peculiar absence of urgency in German politics, one mooted compromise calls on the Greens to drop their insistence on closing the reactors in exchange for their liberal coalition partners dropping objections to speed limits on the Autobahn.

Yet perhaps Germany’s biggest own goal was scored against its own natural-gas industry. Germans lack the luck of the neighbour- ing Dutch, whose giant Groningen field, a mere bicycle-ride from the border, has gushed out some $500bn worth of gas since 1959 (allowing this newspaper in 1977 to coin the term “Dutch Dis- ease”). But neither are Germany’s own reserves puny. At the turn of the millennium Germany was pumping out some 20bn cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas a year, enough to meet close to a quarter of national demand. But although geologists think that Germany holds at least 800bcm of exploitable gas, production has not grown but rather collapsed, to a mere 5-6bcm, equivalent to just 10% of imports from Russia.

Fear of fracking

The reason is simple. Geology dictates that nearly all Germany’s gas can only be extracted using hydraulic fracturing, but the Ger- man public holds an irrational fear of fracking. Not just a fear: in 2017 Ms Merkel’s government passed a law that essentially bans commercial fracking, even though German firms have been using the technique in the country since the 1950s, with not a single re- ported incident of serious environmental damage.

The causes of the public’s fear are not hard to find. In 2008 Exxon, a big American oil firm, proposed expanding the use of fracking at a site in northern Germany. As environmentalists piled in to protest, the increasingly influential Green party joined the fray. So did Russia Today, a pro-Kremlin channel, blaring warnings that fracking causes radiation, birth defects, hormone imbalances, the release of immense volumes of methane and toxic waste, and the poisoning of fish stocks. No less an expert than Mr Putin himself declared, before an international conference, that fracking makes black goop spew out of kitchen taps.

Germans do seem to like fairy tales. “Eventually we gave up trying to explain that fracking is absolutely safe,” sighs Hans-Joach- im Kümpel, a former head of the main government advisory body on geoscience. ”I can’t really blame people who have no under- standing of subsurface geology, if all they hear is horror stories.”

German gas producers say that given a chance, with today’s even cleaner and safer new fracking methods they could double their output in as little as 18-24 months. At that level Germany could be pumping gas well into the next century. That would trim imports by some $15bn a year. And that is no fairy tale.