ANALYSIS - Danish Permit Recall Is Only Minor Setback To Baltic Pipe Project

BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 05th June, 2021) Denmark's recall of a permit for the Baltic Pipe is just a bump in the road for the $2-billion project that will link Poland to the Norwegian gas fields, a senior energy expert told Sputnik on Friday.

Poland sees the pipeline as a way of diversifying its gas supplies away from Russia. Gazprom's long-term contract on natural gas exports to Poland expires in 2022, the same year that the Baltic Pipe is scheduled to go live. It has an estimated capacity of 10 billion cubic meters per year.

The Polish gas grid operator Gaz-System said on Friday it was carrying on with the gas link's construction despite the decision of a Danish environmental panel to repeal the July 2019 permit. The panel said pipeline operators were yet to prove that the 130-mile-long onshore section would not affect the breeding and foraging areas of endangered dormice, Nordic birch mice and bats.

"The solution will undoubtedly be found, this will probably require the displacement of the gas pipeline route by a few kilometers to avoid the sites where these field mice and these bats live. This is done regularly on works of this type," Samuele Furfari told Sputnik.

Furfari, a professor of geopolitics of energy at ULB university in Brussels and a former top civil servant at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Energy, predicted that natural gas would become a fuel of preference in Poland and elsewhere in Europe.

"For Gazprom and Russia, that won't make a big difference to volumes, as Poland will get its [Russian] gas from Germany. Russian gas has a very low production cost and will always remain more competitive than American LNG. Gazprom has room to lower its price if necessary, the Americans do not," he said.

Jean-Marc Laurent, a teacher living on the French-Belgian border and a keen nature activist who has been managing several large bird sanctuaries and natural reserves in the European LIFE network, told Sputnik that environmental activists were concerned about industrial projects undermining unique biotopes.

"The Danish Environmental Protection Agency is very serious and well organized. If they declare their opposition, it is not out of pure ecological opposition, for a few mice and bats; it is for good reasons. The authorities should check whether alternative routes of the gas pipeline are possible," he said.

Laurent argued that onshore pipeline construction required major earthworks that would remove shelters where bats and other small animals sleep during the day and destroy their food source, driving them permanently from their territory.