As early as the beginning of EU , some people had planned the choice of energy in the EU, which caused a fierce battle between the nuclear energy utilization faction led by France and the gas utilization faction led by Germany.
In the end, Germany was safer in gas and won the final victory of the battle in the short term. Therefore, the EU began to popularize the use of natural gas , which made the EU begin to find major exporters of natural gas, and thus began to strengthen trade relations with Russia.
However, as Russia-EU relations deteriorated, the EU began to consider replacing major natural gas importers, which led the EU to directly transport natural gas from the pipeline to import liquefied natural gas .
It is obvious that the price of imported liquefied natural gas is much more expensive. In addition, the EU's imported liquefied natural gas must also rely on LNG transport ships, which makes the EU's energy security issues increasingly prominent.
Although the EU has made a lot of efforts to change its own energy structure, one of which is a very important one is to turn to the use of nuclear energy again. can be said to be inseparable from China before the EU completely changed its energy structure. So why is the EU inseparable from China?
1. Liquefied natural gas depends on LNG transport ships
As the relationship between Russia and Europe continues to deteriorate, the EU has also expanded the scope of sanctions against Russia, and thus, the EU, which was originally going to import natural gas from Russia, began to turn to import liquefied natural gas. In fact, importing liquefied natural gas is just a delaying strategy for the EU. What the EU really does is to completely change its energy structure and focus on nuclear energy. However, before the energy structure changes, the EU still relies on natural gas, which makes the EU have to turn to continuously import liquefied natural gas to temporarily meet its energy needs.
If you want to import liquefied natural gas on a large scale, you must first solve the capacity problem. Currently, LNG carriers in the world are mainly transported by LNG carriers, which makes the EU also have to consider the capacity issue.
Currently, there are only 696 LNG transport ships around the world, and less than 700 transport ships are difficult to meet the global transportation needs. This makes the United States, the major liquefied natural gas exporter, have to consider the issue of LNG transport ships even if it wants to export large amounts of liquefied natural gas to the EU.
Once there was a country in the EU that produced LNG transport ships, which was Greece . However, since the industry moved to South Korea, it was even more difficult for the EU to rebuild the production line of LNG transport ships, which forced the EU to choose to purchase LNG transport ships from the outside world.
Currently, the main importer of LNG transport ships in the EU is still South Korea, after all, in the field of LNG transport ships. South Korea is the one who has been deeply engaged for the longest time, followed by China and Japan. As orders for LNG transport ships surge, China has also been given a lot of corresponding orders, so this has allowed China to play an important role in the field of importing liquefied natural gas from the EU.
2. China has become a major producer of LNG transport ships
Due to the increasing number of LNG transport ships needed by the EU, this has led to the EU's continuous release of relevant orders for LNG transport ships to the outside world, thus causing the producers of LNG transport ships to begin to fall into a state of order saturation.
After receiving orders from 83 LNG transport ships, South Korea announced that it would no longer accept orders from LNG transport ships to the public. This allowed China to start receiving remaining orders and received orders from 28 LNG transport ships, creating the best historical achievement of China receiving orders from LNG transport ships. It can be seen that China will continue to expand its production capacity in the future and become a major producer of LNG transport ships.
From the perspective of receiving orders, although China has a considerable gap with South Korea, as a country that has come from behind, it is already difficult for China to independently develop LNG transport ships and catch up with South Korea in a short period of time. Therefore, in the future, China will inevitably start to accept more orders for LNG transport ships in the world by continuously narrowing the technological gap with South Korea, which also makes the EU increasingly inseparable from China.
can make the EU increasingly inseparable from China, and naturally it has China's advantages in the manufacturing technology of LNG transport ships. Although it started late compared to South Korea, China is almost completely independent research and development, so China is leading in many design concepts on LNG transport ships.
This has made China's exported LNG transport ships have received wide praise from customers around the world. In addition, in terms of manufacturing tonnage, China has begun to switch to the manufacturing of large-tonnage LNG transport ships, which allows China's large-tonnage LNG transport ships to greatly reduce the problem of insufficient capacity caused by too few LNG transport ships.
has technical advantages. In the future, China will export more and more LNG transport ships to the EU, which has forced the EU to be restricted by China in terms of energy transportation.
China makes far more money than Russia once exported EU natural gas. This also shows the interests of exporting high-end technology products. At the same time, it has enabled China to transform from its past technological disadvantages to its technological advantages, successfully opening a breakthrough in the field of foreign trade, allowing China to stand on the field of export of high-end technology products.
Once China was often at a disadvantage in trade with the EU, and most of the export products were not technically high. However, as the relations between Russia and Europe deteriorated, the demand for imported liquefied natural gas from the EU surged.
This has caused China to export large quantities of LNG transport ships to the EU, thus making the EU dependent on China in energy imports, and also causing China to begin to reverse the disadvantages of trade with Europe. This is a profound point.
