I have said already several times that for gas, the major problem is the difficulty of transportation and the high cost of transportation. So now, it is time to speak about how gas can be transported. Basically, there are two ways of transporting gas. One, which is the easiest if you wish is the gas leaving gas in gaseous form as a gas, and then you transport it in a pipeline. That's the only way of transporting gas that is reasonably efficient. The alternative to that is to cool the gas down and take it to a level of minus 161.5 degrees centigrade at which level, it liquefies, it shrinks. The volume is shrunk 600 times, so it becomes much more dense and it becomes a liquid. It's inert liquid that will not easily burn or explode simply because it's so cold. So once we have chilled gas to this very low temperature, it becomes a liquid, and this is what we call liquefied natural gas or LNG. LNG is just a way to transport gas. The only thing you can do with LNG is load it on a ship and take it to a point where it will be turned into gas again and used in gaseous form. So in the end, gas is almost always used in gaseous form. Recent times, there has been talk about using LNG in ships to substitute for bunker fuel. In which case, you need to have a very well insulated tank and the stack will allow the LNG to boil slowly and you take the boil and you utilize for propelling the ship. Similarly, there has been some interest especially in the United States in using gas for heavy lorries for commercial transportation. That is a possibility, but it's required to have some extremely well insulated tanks because otherwise, the gas will turn into gas again from being liquid, and it is not going to work very well. So we have these two alternatives, gas pipeline or LNG. Both technologies have one thing in common, and that is they require very large upfront investment. You need to engage in very large investment before you can transport the gas. The difference is that a gas pipeline is a linear structure. It connects point A to point B, and it only serves clients that lie along the route of the pipeline. An LNG chain is more flexible, not only because it can shift from one direction to another, but also because it can serve multiple clients. An LNG chain is composed of a liquefaction plant, a set of ships or LNG carriers, and at the receiving end, a regasification plant. A regasification plant is a relatively simple structure. It's not very expensive. So you can have a multitude of regasification plants. In the LNG, original LNG plant can serve several customers in different parts of the world. All you need to do is to send your ship in one direction or another. A pipeline, this is not possible. What is the advantage of a pipeline? The cost of transporting gas by pipeline is directly proportional to the distance. So for short distances, a pipeline is normally better. But as distance increases, the cost of transporting gas by pipeline increases rapidly. So for long distances, the pipeline suffers. Another key element is the dimension of the pipe, because the unit cost of transporting gas will increase less than the size of the pipeline. The cost of the pipeline increases as a function of diameter of the pipe, but the volume of gas that you can transport through the pipeline increases as a function of the square of the diameter. So you have an advantage, the larger the pipeline it is. LNG has an advantage for long distance. But it suffers because there is a fixed cost at the beginning, that is cost of liquefaction. So for very short distances, it will not pay to liquefy the gas, because you have to suffer an initial costs which we will not be able to compensate for. But if you have long distances, then it may pay to liquefy the natural gas and transport it as an LNG. For long sea passengers, LNG is essentially the sole alternative. So if your client is Japan or South Korea, and you are in the Middle East, there is no alternative for you than to liquefy the gas and send it as LNG. In the slide that you see now on your screen, we represent the transportation costs for the gas by pipeline, by LNG, by different size of the pipeline. We also represent the transportation costs for oil and coal. The cost for oil and coal are the two lines lying almost at the bottom of the chart. You can see that in the case of oil or coal, it is possible to transport these materials over very long distances, 7,000-8,000 miles and the increase in the cost is not really very important. Just a few cents are added to the cost of the oil or the coal if it is transported over long distances. In the case of gas, the situation is quite different. Transportation by pipeline is represented by the lines that originate from the origin from point zero. That is because if you have zero distance, you have zero cost. But then as you can see, the cost increases quite rapidly especially for the smaller pipeline, which is the red dotted line. As the size of the pipeline increases, the cost increases less rapidly until you reach the largest size, which is currently use 56 inches pipeline, and that allows you to transport gas over significant distances of close to 3000 miles, and still be competitive with LNG. But for distances exceeding 3000, miles, essentially LNG is the only solution. LNG of course does not start from the origin because at the beginning, you have the cost of liquefaction, and that is about four dollars per million BTU, totally independently of the distance that you have to cover. So you start from a level of four dollars per million BTU, but then they increase in cost is much slower. It is not as steep as for a pipeline, and so you can transport gas over very long distances at a cost which is still significant, but it's less overwhelming than with a pipeline. The next slide tells you where pipeline gas prevails and where LNG prevails. The conclusion is very simple. Pipelines are utilized for importing gas into Europe and exporting gas out of Russia. So pipelines are the backbone of the Russian-European gas trade. Europe and Russia essentially and actually exclusively trade gas by pipeline. In contrast, on the right hand of the chart, you can see that LNG is used primarily to export gas out of the Middle East and into Asia Pacific, or for exporting gas within Asia Pacific. So the market for LNG is primarily in the far East, in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or China that are major consumers of gas and import this gas from the Middle East. The last slide shows the distribution of gas in different markets, and it shows that essentially, we have three entirely separate gas markets in this world. One is the North American market, which today essentially does not trade with the rest of the world. You have a trade within North America in between Canada and the United States, between United States and Mexico. But very minor trade with the rest of the world. Then you have far East market, which is essentially an LNG market. Now receives gas from various origins in the far East itself or from the Middle East and some also from Africa. Finally, you have the European gas market which is essentially a pipeline gas market, receives gas from Russia or North Africa primarily by pipeline. Some of it also by LNG from Qatar or Nigeria. These three markets are separate and the price of gas is completely different on each of these three markets. Gas is very cheap in North America, it is very expensive in the far East, and it is in a medium position in Europe. The reason why we have such large price differences is that gas does not travel easily and therefore, it cannot be taken commercially from North America to where it costs less to the far East where it costs the most.
