Nord Stream and European Energy Security

The Gazprom-led Nord Stream Two gas pipeline project supported by Russia, Germany and a consortium of five Western European companies is slated to be completed by the year 2019. Parallel to the existing Nord Stream One pipeline on the Baltic seabed, Nord Stream Two would double the system’s total capacity to 110 billion cubic meters (bcm) annually, all earmarked for direct delivery to Germany. This volume will constitute 80 percent of all Russian gas supplies to Europe, channeled through a single transit route. The Nord Stream project would bypass a number of key U.S. allies in Central-Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, potentially eliminating Ukraine as a major transit route to Europe.

The project presents a dilemma for the European Union, which will have to find a consensus among its members to protect its energy security and anti-monopoly policies. It would also undermine the expansion of U.S. LNG supplies to Europe, if Gazprom starts dumping gas prices to undercut the budding spot market and unfairly compete with American LNG companies.

The expert speakers convened for “Nord Stream and European Energy Security” provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the Russian objectives, European responses, and American policies related to this large project.

Agenda 

Registration
1:45 P.M.–2:00 P.M.

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Welcome
2:00 P.M.

Glen E. Howard
President, The Jamestown Foundation

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Panel One:

Russian Geopolitical Objectives vs. European Gas Supply Diversification
2:00 P.M.–3:30 P.M.

“Russia’s Geopolitical Objectives Through Energy Projects”
Michael Carpenter
Senior Director, Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement
and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

“Nord Stream Project’s Implications for Europe”
Matthew Bryza
Board Member, The Jamestown Foundation, and former
U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan and U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State

“U.S. Sanctions Policy and Europe’s Energy Security”
Daniel Fried
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and Ambassador to Poland

“European Union’s Dilemma on Nord Stream”
Anders Åslund
Senior Fellow, The Atlantic Council

Moderator:

Margarita Assenova
Director of Programs, Balkans, Caucasus & Central Asia,
The Jamestown Foundation

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Coffee Break
3:30 P.M.–3:45 P.M.

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Keynote Address
3:45 P.M.–4:15 P.M.

“Nord Stream Project’s Implications for US LNG Export to Europe”

Amos Hochstein
Senior Vice-President, Tellurian Inc. and
Former U.S. Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs,
U.S. Department of State 

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Panel Two:

Nord Stream: Implications for Central and Eastern Europe and the Southern Gas Corridor
4:15 – 5:45 P.M.

“Nord Stream Project’s Impact on Ukraine and the Baltic States”
Keith Smith
Senior Fellow, Center for European Policy Analysis
and former U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania

 “Nord Stream Project’s Implications for Southeast Europe”
Margarita Assenova
Director of Programs, Balkans, Caucasus & Central Asia,
The Jamestown Foundation

“Nord Stream and Turkish Stream: Implications for the Black Sea Region”
Vladimir Socor
Senior Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation

Moderator:

Matthew Czekaj
Program Associate for Europe and Eurasia,
The Jamestown Foundation

*       *       *

Concluding Remarks

5:45 P.M.

Participant Biographies:

Anders Åslund

Dr. Anders Åslund is a resident senior fellow in the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. He also teaches at Georgetown University. He is a leading specialist on economic policy in Russia, Ukraine, and East Europe. Åslund has served as an economic adviser to several governments, notably the governments of Russia (199-94) and Ukraine (1994-97). He is chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research, Warsaw, and of the Scientific Council of the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition. He has published widely and is the author of fourteen books, most recently with Simeon Djankov, Europe’s Growth Challenge (OUP, 2017) and Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It (2015). Other books of his are How Capitalism Was Built (CUP, 2013) and Russia’s Capitalist Revolution (2007). He has also edited sixteen books.

Previously, he worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He served as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He earned his Ph.D. from Oxford University.

Margarita Assenova

Margarita Assenova is Jamestown Foundation’s Director of Programs for the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. She is a contributor to the Jamestown publication Eurasia Daily Monitor on political and energy security developments in the Balkans and Central Asia. Assenova is a recipient of the John Knight Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University for her reporting on nationalism in the Balkans. She has authored book chapters and journal articles on security, energy, and democracy published by CSIS Press, Brassey’s, Freedom House, Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers, the University of New Haven, and the Jamestown Foundation.

Assenova’s latest books include Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks (Jamestown Foundation, 2016), a critical study on Russian subversion in Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, co-authored with Janusz Bugajski, and the edited volume Azerbaijan and the New Energy Geopolitics of Southeastern Europe  (Jamestown Foundation, 2015). 

Matthew Bryza

Ambassador Matthew Bryza is a member of the board of the Jamestown Foundation. He is the director of the International Center for Defense Studies in Tallinn, Estonia. He completed a 23-year career as a U.S. diplomat, over half of which was spent at the center of policy-making and international negotiations on major energy infrastructure projects and regional conflicts in Eurasia. His most recent assignment was as U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan from February 2011 to January 2012. Between 2005 and 2009, Bryza served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, with responsibility for Eurasian Energy, the South Caucasus, Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus. Bryza simultaneously served as the U.S. Co-Chair of the OSCE’s Minsk Group mediating the Karabakh conflict, and as U.S. mediator of the Cyprus, South Ossetia and Abkhazia conflicts.

From 2001 to 2005, Bryza served in the White House as Director for European and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council Staff. His responsibilities included Eurasian energy, the South Caucasus, Central Asia and political Islam in Eurasia. Previous assignments include Deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Energy, Advisor on Economic Reform in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and Russia Desk Officer at the State Department, as well as Political Officer at the U.S. Missions to Russia (1995-97) and Poland (1989-91). Currently, Ambassador Bryza resides in Istanbul, Turkey, where he also works as a consultant on business and democratic development and is a board member of several private companies.

Michael Carpenter

Dr. Michael Carpenter is Senior Director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.  He is also a member of the Jamestown Foundation board of directors.  Dr. Carpenter previously served in the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control.  He also served in the White House as a foreign policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden as well as on the National Security Council as Director for Russia.  Previously, Dr. Carpenter was a career Foreign Service Officer with the State Department.  He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University.  Dr. Carpenter has appeared regularly on MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, Bloomberg News, Voice of America, and has been frequently cited or published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, McClatchy, Foreign Policy, Atlantic, Politico, Buzzfeed, The Hill, and Defense One.

Matthew Czekaj

Matthew Czekaj is a Program Associate for Europe and Eurasia at The Jamestown Foundation and also serves as the Managing Editor of Jamestown’s daily publication, the Eurasia Daily Monitor. Prior to joining Jamestown, Mr. Czekaj was a Research Associate at the Atlantic Council, where he worked on issues of European Enlargement. Before that, he was a Research Assistant at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) Energy Security Program. Mr. Czekaj holds a Master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations with a concentration in European Studies from Johns Hopkins University. 

Daniel Fried

Ambassador Daniel Fried is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. In the course of his forty-year Foreign Service career, Ambassador Fried played a key role in designing and implementing American policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.  As special assistant and NSC senior director for Presidents Clinton and Bush, ambassador to Poland, and assistant secretary of state for Europe (2005-2009), Ambassador Fried crafted the policy of NATO enlargement to Central European nations and, in parallel, NATO-Russia relations, thus advancing the goal of Europe whole, free, and at peace. During those years, the West’s community of democracy and security grew in Europe.

Ambassador Fried helped lead the West’s response to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine starting in 2014: as State Department coordinator for sanctions policy, he crafted US sanctions against Russia, the largest US sanctions program to date, and negotiated the imposition of similar sanctions by Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia.

Ambassador Fried also served as the State Department’s first special envoy for the closure of the Guantanamo (GTMO) Detainee Facility. He established procedures for the transfer of individual detainees and negotiated the transfers of seventy detainees to twenty countries, with improved security outcomes.

Amos Hochstein

Amos Hochstein is the Senior Vice President of Tellurian. He previously served as the U.S. Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs and led the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Energy Resources. As the U.S. “Energy Diplomat,” Hochstein oversaw global U.S. energy foreign policy engagement and advised the Secretary of State and the Vice President of the U.S. on global energy markets.

As Special Envoy, Hochstein led the engagement to strengthen Europe’s energy security through diversification of natural gas resources; authored the White House Caribbean Energy Security Initiative; chaired the President’s U.S. – Caribbean and U.S. – Central America Energy Security Task Force; led U.S. efforts to promote global fuel switching to natural gas and develop stronger natural gas markets throughout Asia and South Asia; and; Working closely with the Department of Defense, Mr. Hochstein led the U.S. efforts to diminish ISIL and other terrorist groups’ profits from energy assets. Prior to serving in the State Department, Mr. Hochstein served in a variety of senior level positions on Capitol Hill and advised energy companies entering and developing new markets.

Keith Smith

Ambassador Keith Smith is a Distinguished CEPA Fellow in Residence. He was previously a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He retired from the U.S. Department of State in 2000, where his career focused primarily on European affairs. From 1997 to 2000, he was U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania, with additional posts in Europe, including Hungary, Norway and Estonia. In addition to several other State Department assignments, he most recently served as Director of Policy for Europe and Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of State regarding U.S. assistance programs in Eastern Europe.

Since 2000, Ambassador Smith has been a consultant to several energy companies and has lectured on Russian-European energy issues in the United States, Poland, Belgium, Norway, United Kingdom, Germany, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Lithuania. His most recent publications include “Unconventional Gas and European Security: Politics and Foreign Policy of Fracking in Europe,” “Managing the Challenge of Russian Energy Policies,” and “Lack of Transparency in Russian Energy Trade.”

Vladimir Socor

Vladimir Socor is a Senior Fellow of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation and its flagship publication, Eurasia Daily Monitor (1995 to present), where he writes analytical articles on a daily basis. An internationally recognized expert on former Soviet-ruled countries in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, he covers Russian and Western policies there, focusing on energy policies, regional security issues, secessionist conflicts, and NATO policies and programs.

Mr. Socor is a frequent speaker at U.S. and European policy conferences and think-tank institutions. He is a regular guest lecturer at the NATO Defense College and at Harvard University’s National Security Program’s Black Sea Program (Kennedy School of Government). He is also a frequent contributor to edited volumes. Mr. Socor was previously an analyst with the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (1983–1994). He is a Romanian-born citizen of the United States based in Munich, Germany.