The Five-Year Engineering Feat Germany Pulled Off in Months
Kanebridge News
Share Button

The Five-Year Engineering Feat Germany Pulled Off in Months

Europe is racing to build natural-gas facilities to keep its economy afloat; ‘It’s a battle’

By GEORGI KANTCHEV
Fri, Dec 9, 2022 8:58amGrey Clock 6 min

WILHELMSHAVEN, Germany—In March, the German government asked energy companies to weigh a seemingly impossible engineering task. Could a new liquefied natural gas import terminal, which normally takes at least five years to build, be erected in this port town by year’s end?

At the headquarters of the company asked to build the pipeline portion, technical director Thomas Hüwener posed that question to his team. “If no, then it’s a no,” he told them. “If yes, then we have to commit, with all the possible consequences for our company.”

After three days deliberations, the company concluded that if everything went perfectly the project could be done by Christmas. Since then, it has had to contend with potentially toxic soil and environmental regulations protecting frogs and bats. When workers encountered high groundwater, they had to drain trenches, then backfill them.

Another company building a jetty for the floating terminal needed to scan the seabed for unexploded World War II-era munitions and scour construction sites across Europe for supplies.

“This project is really a race against time,” said pipeline project manager Franz-Josef Kissing. “It’s a battle.”

Cut off from most Russian natural gas, much of Europe is rushing to line up alternative energy sources and build the infrastructure needed for them. If the continent fails to shore up its energy grid, governments might have to resort to rationing fuel this winter, possibly leading to closed factories and more pain for manufacturers. Next winter could be even tougher if gas storage facilities aren’t replenished. The EU has estimated that ending its reliance on Russian fossil fuels will add at least 300 billion euros, or around $315 billion, in infrastructure costs, through 2030.

Since Russia stopped most natural gas exports to Europe this fall, gas flows from Russia to Germany have shrivelled from 55% of imports last year to zero. The three German liquefied natural gas terminals slated for completion for this year could cover at least 15% of the country’s gas demand. Berlin plans to install several more terminals next year and is working on more permanent installations. It has budgeted more than €6.5 billion for such terminals in 2022.

Dozens of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facilities are slated for construction across the European Union in coming years, which would allow Europe to buy more gas from nations such as Qatar and the U.S.

Within days of taking on the job of building a 19-mile pipeline between the new Wilhelmshaven terminal and the natural gas grid, Mr. Kissing’s employer, pipeline builder Open Grid Europe GmbH, formed a team with specialists in everything from route planning and nature conservation to archaeology and law.

Cooling natural gas to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit turns it into a liquid that can be shipped in oceangoing tankers to terminals, where it can be converted back to gas. A floating LNG terminal is a gas facility on an enormous specialised tanker that receives liquid gas from another tanker and returns it to a gaseous state.

The jetty that will be home to the floating Wilhelmshaven terminal is an especially complicated project because it has to withstand the force of two large, gas-filled ships pressing against it. For Niedersachsen Ports GmbH & Co. KG, which is building the jetty, the first challenge was finding materials—quickly. Ordering them from a factory would have taken months. Mathias Lüdicke, the company’s Wilhelmshaven branch manager, said the company had to scour Europe for construction materials, including the steel piles that would be driven into the seabed.

Niedersachsen Ports called suppliers in France, the Netherlands, Finland and the Baltics. It found 165-foot steel piles on an idle construction site in Lithuania. The original plan had called for smaller ones, so the company adjusted the blueprint.

To save time, much of the 3,000 cubic meters of concrete needed for the project was brought in the form of huge, semifinished blocks, which were assembled like Lego pieces.

“We needed stuff that’s ready,” Mr. Lüdicke said. “So we changed the whole planning process as we went along, based on what was available.”

Niedersachsen Ports idled other projects to focus on the job. Employees worked through Easter weekend to get the necessary documents ready. “Nobody paid attention to overtime because we all said, this has to work,” Mr. Lüdicke said.

The German bureaucracy made adjustments, too. The parliament passed an LNG Acceleration Act, speeding up procedures for reviewing, approving and awarding contracts for LNG projects.

“If there is a chance in this really terrible situation, it is that we shake off all this sleepiness and, in some cases, grouchiness that exists in Germany,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in March about speeding up the construction of LNG terminals.

Other large construction projects have moved slowly in Germany. In 2020, Berlin opened its new airport nine years behind schedule. Stuttgart’s new railway station, under construction since 2010, is now scheduled to open in 2025, after years of delays and ballooning costs.

The state of Niedersachsen issued some of the necessary permits for the LNG terminal on May 1, the International Workers’ Day, a Sunday. “It’s not a day when you’d expect that to happen,” said Olaf Lies, the state’s economy minister. “We needed a new German speed.”

Similar projects elsewhere in Europe have faced opposition from activists who are against building new fossil-fuel infrastructure, and those who say such projects harm the local environment.

In Italy, a floating LNG terminal in the Tuscan port of Piombino is supposed to go into service next May. But several local groups have staged protests, claiming the project poses risks for residents and the environment. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said anchoring the new vessel in Piombino is vital for Italy’s economy and for national security.

In Germany, the new pipeline would cross the path of an annual migration of frogs. To keep the creatures from plunging into a ditch in which the pipe would be buried, Mr. Kissing’s team erected frog fences. In some cases, experts had to create new caves for bats.

When they started digging, they discovered another problem. The soil in the region contains high concentrations of sulphate acid, which could become toxic under some circumstances if exposed to oxygen for too long.

Also, the groundwater level was high. The trenches had to be dry to weld the pipes together.

To solve both problems, Mr. Kissing’s 800 workers worked in 400-foot increments, draining the trenches with pumps, then backfilling them.

“You may rush as much as you want, but soil is soil,” Mr. Kissing said while walking around the site on a recent rainy morning.

The groundwater also contained more iron than the norm. So the company had to build special de-ironing facilities to filter the water before dumping it back into nearby fields.

Connecting the new pipeline to the German gas grid presented another problem. It needs to link to an existing pipeline carrying gas from Norway, which has become essential for Germany and can’t be shut down for the linkup work to occur in the coming days. A bypass device had to be built to keep the gas flowing.

Before it could start building the jetty, Niedersachsen Ports first needed to search for unexploded World War II ordnance. Wilhelmshaven, Germany’s only deep-water port, was bombed heavily during the war. The company scanned the seabed and removed some smaller ordnance.

In September, with four months to go before the deadline, a problem cropped up that threatened to make it impossible to finish on time. The Wilhelmshaven sea lock—a structure in the port used for raising and lowering boats passing between stretches of water—had a mechanical failure, prompting the port to shut down the passage. The piles needed for the jetty, which were being welded together at the harbour, were stuck there.

Mr. Lüdicke met with officials from the waterway authority and German navy and devised a workaround. The port would allow the ships carrying the piles to pass through the lock with just one gate open, but only when the tides were such that the water levels were equal.

“It was a very fine balancing act, a lot of coordination,” Mr. Lüdicke said. “If we hadn’t managed to do that, we wouldn’t have been able to launch the terminal this year.”

In September, explosions damaged the Nord Stream pipelines running under the Baltic Sea a few hundred miles east of Wilhelmshaven, in what European authorities have called an act of sabotage. That sparked concerns across Europe about the vulnerability of energy infrastructure. The local police dispatched officers along the route of the new pipeline, and boats patrolled around the jetty.

Mr. Lüdicke is hoping for good weather as his team races toward the finish line. Bad weather could force delays, and heavy wind routinely halts work. There is still work to be done and tests to be carried out before the floating terminal, the 965-foot Hoegh Esperanza, can dock in Wilhelmshaven in the coming days and the gas can start flowing.

Utility Uniper SE, which the German state recently agreed to nationalize and which will operate the terminal, said that if all goes according to plan, the first tanker carrying LNG will arrive at the start of next year.

“If we have extreme weather, that could cause problems and delay things,” Mr. Lüdicke said. “We’re so close.”

—Margherita Stancati contributed to this article.



MOST POPULAR

As Australia’s family offices expand their presence in private credit, a growing number of commercial real estate debt (CRED) managers are turning to them as flexible, strategic funding partners.

Knight Frank’s latest Horizon 2025 update signals renewed confidence in Australian commercial real estate, with signs of recovery accelerating across cities and sectors.

Related Stories
Lifestyle
Soneva’s Coral Program Earns UN Backing in Major Win for Marine Restoration
By Jeni O'Dowd 22/05/2025
Lifestyle
Our Retirement Travel Plan? Wing It.
By Diane Di Costanzo 21/05/2025
Lifestyle
MARCEL ZALLOUA CLAIMS PODIUM FINISH AT SYDNEY MOTORSPORT PARK IN GT WORLD CHALLENGE AUSTRALIA
By Kanebridge Staff 16/05/2025
Soneva’s Coral Program Earns UN Backing in Major Win for Marine Restoration

Soneva’s groundbreaking Coral Restoration Program in the Maldives has been endorsed by the United Nations and listed on UNESCO’s Ocean Decade platform, recognising it as a global model for reef regeneration and sustainable marine science.

By Jeni O'Dowd
Thu, May 22, 2025 2 min

In a landmark moment for marine conservation, the Soneva Foundation’s Coral Restoration Program has received official endorsement from the United Nations and been listed on the UNESCO Ocean Decade website — an international recognition of its pioneering work in large-scale reef restoration.

Based in the Maldives and operating from Soneva Fushi’s AquaTerra science centre, the program is now the region’s largest coral restoration facility. Combining advanced marine biology with local collaboration, it has redefined how the tourism sector can contribute meaningfully to ocean health.

What sets the program apart is its blend of innovation and scale. The facility includes a Coral Spawning and Rearing Lab—Maldives’ first of its kind—replicating natural reef conditions to stimulate coral reproduction. Thirty micro-fragmentation tanks further accelerate coral growth, enabling up to 150,000 coral fragments to be produced and replanted on damaged reefs each year.

Since launching in 2022, Soneva’s coral team has relocated more than 31,000 coral colonies and fragments from threatened areas, establishing a thriving coral hub in the Indian Ocean.

he initiative is managed by Soneva Conservation, a Maldivian NGO set up by the Soneva Foundation, and forms part of the group’s broader sustainability strategy.

“This milestone is a testament to the scientific rigour and community-driven ethos at the heart of our work,”  Dr Johanna Leonhardt, Soneva’s Coral Project Manager, said.  “It validates the potential of hospitality to lead ocean regeneration at scale.”

Beyond science, the program engages governments, NGOs, research institutions and the wider tourism industry—demonstrating how cross-sector partnerships can drive real environmental impact.

The UN recognition now positions the project as a beacon for similar initiatives globally, reinforcing the Maldives’ role as both a luxury destination and a marine conservation leader.

The Soneva Foundation’s wider environmental efforts include carbon mitigation projects, reforestation, and waste-to-wealth innovation. As part of the Pallion group, Soneva continues to redefine what it means to be a responsible luxury brand.

MOST POPULAR

If U.S. stock prices continue to fall, wealthy consumers could slow their spending, putting further pressure on the U.S. economy and markets. That could mean everything from fewer luxury cars and handbags being sold to reduced demand for top-end homes and fancy vacations. Broadly, retail sales rose a less-than-expected 0.2% in February from January, the Census Bureau …

Art can transform more than just walls—it shapes mood, evokes memory, and elevates the everyday. Discover how thoughtfully curated interiors can become living expressions of personal meaning and refined luxury, from sculptural furniture to bespoke murals.

Related Stories
Money
China Pumps Up Support for Country’s Stock Markets
By TRACY QU 23/01/2025
Money
Why 2025 Could Be a Great Year for Big Banks
By Jon Sindreu 30/12/2024
Lifestyle
Power of the Purse. Birkins and Kellys Dominate the Collectible Handbags Category.
By LAURIE KAHLE 14/03/2025
0
    Your Cart
    Your cart is emptyReturn to Shop