I love pipelines. Truly. They are one of the most elegant pieces of industrial infrastructure ever devised. Incredibly efficient, remarkably safe, and brutally reliable. If you can turn something into a liquid — or a gas — a pipeline will move it quietly, steadily, and without drama. And as long as what you feed into the pipe isn’t aggressively corrosive, those beasts will hum along in the background until Hell freezes over.
Unless, of course, someone decides to mess with them.
Impossible, you say? Especially offshore? I beg to differ. You may want to remind yourself what happened to Nord Stream. And it’s not only hostile states playing games. In parts of Africa, far smaller pipelines fail with depressing regularity — sometimes leaking, sometimes blowing up entirely — not because of grand geopolitical sabotage, but because of theft, tapping, and amateur interference layered on top of weak security.
Pipes are hard to hide and even harder to protect. They are long, exposed strings of critical infrastructure, and you only need to interrupt them at a single point to invalidate the entire system. One cut, one blast, one valve compromised — and the whole thing is dead.
This is where LNG shines. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s structurally resilient. Terminals can be secured. Ships can be protected. Take one asset out and the rest keeps moving. Close a waterway and the fleet reroutes. It’s not invulnerable — nothing is — but it is vastly harder to cripple in one clean strike.
And no, it’s not automatically more expensive than pipelines, despite what the talking points say. That particular lie will have to die one day as well.
