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I was in that business for 30+ years with Danish Esso’s tanker fleet!!!

I suspected as much. Somebody used that gas, hence the delivery system was adequate for their purposes. So all you are arguing is cost and scale.

If you are going to supply Europe instead of Russia with gas, how many vessels do you think it would take to replace Russia’s pipeline, huh???

A lot. I had no doubt that it would be difficult when I posted that image, but I also knew when the Germans and Russians built that pipeline what a problem it would be. If I knew it, so did everybody else. They took that risk and now they must face the cost or lose much of their freedom. Were I them, I'd get hot with ordering a few small nuclear reactors with which to build a distributed electrical generating system (Toshiba makes a sweet little unit). In the mean time, they could probably go back to coal for a while, but no matter what, they'll need gas.

This situation with European dependency upon Russian gas is just a symptom of a much bigger problem. It was built, deliberately, by communist control freaks playing the global warming scam for all it was worth. It was built by corporate players and politicians seeking national advantages. We should all take the warning. Free markets, while very good at managing usual and smaller risks that have been commoditized (fires, floods, industrial accidents...), typically socialize the big risks (wars, blockades, massive natural disasters...). Hence, they lack preparation for even completely predictable events because of competitive forces when considering infrequent large scale events, particularly when that competition is among nations. Managing such risk by investing in national defense among other things is why we have governments with representatives willing to force all the players to take a hit on a daily basis with which to account for the risk of an eventual catastrophe. This is just as true of protection against importation of exotic species as it is military preparation, earthquakes, maintaining alternative suppliers, or safety stocks of critical strategic materials. Yet the entire industrialized world is headed the other way, the best example being the way the entire EU has blown off national defense.

Look at JIT manufacturing and distribution. Inventory has become everybody's enemy, money that is supposedly not producing anything at the moment, not because it isn't valuable but because that risk is not accounted in daily trading. Yet with that trend comes a risk of an interruption in supply. Nations used to stock food sufficient for over a year. No more. Enviros scream to get rid of gravity stored water. Our electrical grid runs on the edges. Information systems allocate goods so perfectly nobody is lacking... today, this minute. Meanwhile that risk of catastrophe grows and the pinprick to instigate it becomes ever smaller.

So please don't tell me that such is impossible or unaffordable. It was up to them to secure alternative suppliers and modalities and they didn't do it. Instead they socialized risks when they built the EU, simply making that risk "unthinkable" and babbling kumbayah to make themselves feel better while they footed the welfare state and told a pack of lies about the risks to stay in power. It may be a "better use of capital" right this minute, but not once the risks are accounted. Unfortunately, it's easy for politicians or businesspeople to discount those risks in a competitive world. Liberty costs money just as it frees us to produce wealth.