‘He knows exactly what he is doing,’ said Dr Langley. ‘First, military threat, married to relentless cyber-attacks, and then energy domination. A predecessor used the Red Army. For “red star”, read LPG.’
Bob Langley was in part a trained strategist; he was also a technician. He explained to the non-technical Sir Adrian that, although the under-sea excavators were as yet only halfway, liquid gas was flowing through them already. But to do that, it had to remain liquid, and not be re-vaporized.
To stay liquid, to stay under pressure as it flowed, it needed regular compressor stations approximately every fifty miles along the route. There were three types of these compressors, but they all did the same job.
‘How are they controlled?’
‘Well, by computer, of course. The master computers are in a facility outside Krasnodar on the Russian mainland. Way underground and miles under the Black Sea, the chain of compressor stations receive the flowing LPG, re-pressurize it and send it on its way to the next station, until it eventually emerges on the Turkish shore. To power themselves, they take a “bleed” of natural gas and use that as the energy source for their own needs. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say? Pays for itself, and far away in Siberia, the gas just keeps on flowing.’
Sir Adrian recalled the old saying: ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune.’ Or, in this case, he who keeps the wheels of industry turning. In his bunker in the Kremlin, the Vozhd might preside over a rubbish economy in consumer-goods terms but, with one single weapon, he aimed one day to bend the European continent to his will.
The elderly knight now had enough information to compose and send his missive to the Prime Minister. He then spent two more days in technical research then, having heard back from her, motored north to Chandler’s Court. There, he would confer with Dr Hendricks.
Dear Prime Minister, my thoughts, as you requested.
The future of our part of this planet, Western Europe, and of our country depends not on security. That comes later because, first, we need to be able to afford it. Prosperity is the initial concern. People will fight if they are destined to perpetual poverty.
It was Germany’s pending bankruptcy in the thirties that drove Hitler to invade her neighbours. He needed their assets to head off the national bankruptcy caused by his spending spree. The people would have stopped worshipping him if they had gone back to the conditions of the starving twenties. Nothing much has changed.
Today, the key to prosperity is energy – cheap, constant energy and masses of it. We have tried to harness wind, water, sunshine – ingenious and fashionable, but a mere scratch on the surface of our needs.
Coal, black and brown, is over. Wooden pellets pollute. Ditto crude oil. The future is natural gas. There is enough under our planet’s crust for a century of heat, light and motive power. These create wealth, comfort and food. The people will be content. They will not fight.
We know where vast unmined deposits are to be found, and fresh ones are being discovered all the time. But Nature, being a perverse lady, has not placed them right below the great concentrations of people who need them.
There has recently been a huge natural gas discovery off the shore of Israel. (It extends into three other national sub-sea territories, but its principal ‘find’ belongs to Israel.) There is a problem.
Ov
er short distances, natural gas can be piped under its own pressure from source to consumer. Israel’s new field is fifty miles offshore. With a few booster stations, close enough. For longer transits, the gas must be liquefied and frozen into LPG – liquid petroleum gas. Then it can be shipped in this form, like any other tanker cargo. On arrival, it is re-vaporized to many thousand times the volume of the tanker. Then it can be piped and used as cheap, clean power throughout the country.
It would make a lot of sense for the UK to conclude with Israel a long-term, exclusive deal. They have the gas but no liquification plant. We have the funds and the technology to build one on a sea-platform offshore. It would be a win-win partnership, liberating us from decades-long dependence on possibly hostile states. But this paper is not about Israel. There are even bigger deposits deep inside Russia, but these are many miles away from the potential treasure-house of Western Europe.
To bring this gas ocean to market, Russia – in the form of its oil/gas monopoly Gazprom – must build one or two gigantic pipelines from her gas fields across Eastern Europe to convenient seaports whence the tankers can supply the western half of the continent.
Smaller pipelines have been mooted to cross Belarus and Poland, and also Ukraine, with tanker ports on the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria. But Russia has virtually invaded Ukraine, and relations are strained with Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, all of whom are in the European Union and worry about the Kremlin’s new aggressiveness. The new and final choice is Turkey – hence the ferocious wooing of that barely NATO country and her highly authoritarian President.
Russia has now pinned all her hopes of swamping Western Europe with her natural gas and thus becoming, through our energy dependency, our effective masters. They plan to do this via pipelines to Turkey. There are two under construction. They are called South Stream and Blue Stream.
The main problem is technical. Both, in order to reach Turkish territory from Russia, have to pass under hundreds of miles of the Black Sea. They are being excavated even as you read these lines.
The excavators are machines of bewildering complexity and, like all such machines nowadays, they are computer-controlled. Computers, as we know, can solve many problems, but they can also malfunction.
I remain, Prime Minister, your obedient servant, Adrian Weston.
At Chandler’s Court, Sir Adrian briefed Dr Hendricks. ‘It will be massively protected from interference,’ said the guru from GCHQ. ‘Even if we could get inside, what malware could we insert? What instructions could we give?’
‘I have been advised on that,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘A single trigger malfunction that would entail unfortunate consequences.’
An hour later, the two men were talking with a diffident boy at his computer bank in the operations room.
‘Luke, there is a master computer near a town called Krasnodar …’
A week later, far beneath the blue waters of the Black Sea, something happened in a reciprocating compressor in Blue Stream called K15. The ‘K’ was for the Russian word Kompressor. The desired and instructed pressure began to vary. It did not decrease. Just the reverse. It began to rise.
Three hundred miles away, at a computer centre in a low steel complex of buildings outside Krasnodar, deft fingers made a correction. It had no effect. The pressure inside a machine far under the Black Sea went on rising. In the computer centre, further and more urgent instructions were inserted. K15 refused to obey. A pressure indicator was rising towards a red line.
Inside K15, permissible tolerances were being approached. Seams strained, then rivets popped. Margins of tolerance had been built into the construction, but these were being exceeded. K15 was built like a gigantic car engine with pistons that rotated on a crankshaft. A crankshaft needs lubrication in the form of heavy oil. It began to fume. It ceased to lubricate.