‘We got too comfortable’: Germany’s race to switch its gas supply

theguardian.com:

As tourists at the Hooksiel resort on Germany’s North Sea coastline lean back in their wicker beach chairs or stomp around the mud flats, the cast-iron jetty that stretches for 1.3km into the ocean to their right is a familiar sight. The frantic clanging of metal on metal at its furthest tip, however, is new.

Built in 1982, the jetty was designed to host not just two import terminals for chemicals but also one for liquefied natural gas (LNG), shipped in on tankers from the US. With cheap Russian gas beating LNG for price, those tankers never arrived. Two adjacent plots of land, reclaimed from the North Sea to make space for industry, instead attracted rare warblers and bitterns.

But as Russia’s war in Ukraine upends decades of German energy policy, getting LNG tankers to dock on the Hooksiel jetty is suddenly a matter of national priority.

Wilhelmshaven, the nearby historic port town, has become emblematic of a two-fold, seemingly contradictory promise made by Germany’s government: that it can import LNG to compensate for throttled gas imports from Russia at record speed, belying a reputation for bureaucratic plodding; and that the jetty into the North Sea will carry LNG – a polluting fossil fuel – for only a short time, soon to be replaced with a more climate-friendly substitute.

Wilhelmshaven is one of five floating LNG terminals Germany is rushing to build by the end of the year, creating infrastructure that a study in July by the Fraunhofer Institute argued would be vital to avoid cold homes and closed factories this winter not just in Germany but across all of Europe as Vladimir Putin turns off the tap.

The Höegh Esperanza, a 300-metre long tanker converted into a Floating Storage and Regasification Unit and chartered by