The federal government can also deliver good news just in time for the festival: on Christmas Eve, the living rooms of the first families will be heated with the help of natural gas that has flowed into the grid via the first German LNG terminal.

For the opening of the floating facility on Saturday, a gathering of top politicians came to Wilhelmshaven in a way the Lower Saxony port city has not seen since it was founded.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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Chancellor Scholz, Economics Minister Habeck and Finance Minister Lindner entered the jetty of the naval base as a troika in neon yellow jackets in the morning to have their picture taken on the sun deck of a pleasure boat in front of the Höegh Esperanza.

The ship, which is almost 300 meters long, previously tanked with liquefied natural gas (LNG) itself in Spain, but in future it will mainly regasify liquefied natural gas from other tankers and feed it into the German grid.

For this purpose, a 26-kilometer pipeline was built from Wilhelmshaven to the long-distance network to Etzel.

Everyone involved on Saturday gave each other a big pat on the back for the speed at which all this happened.

The information about the time between application and completion varies between 192 and 194.5 days, depending on the interviewee.

With the usual bureaucracy, the construction of the pipeline alone would otherwise take eight years, says a planner.

Another planner reports that the internal plans put the completion date at April or May 2023 with a 50 percent probability.

The earliest possible point in time "P0" with a perfect process was December 21, 2022.

Template for future projects

The new word for this speed is "Germany speed" or alternatively "Germany speed".

On board the excursion ship "Helgoland" you won't find a politician on Saturday who doesn't use the term, even if Lower Saxony's Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD) would have liked to have established the "Niedersachsen speed" as an alternative.

The "Germany speed" in the construction of the LNG terminal in Wilhelmshaven should serve as a model for future infrastructure projects.

"This is now the new pace in Germany, with which we are advancing infrastructure," says Scholz.

"Independence, security, speed - our country can do it."

According to the SPD politician, Vladimir Putin had hoped that after his attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2002, he would be able to blackmail Germany with its dependence on Russian gas.

But the Kremlin failed to do that.

Not only Russia but also other countries looked at the speed with which Germany, with its new LNG terminals, is making itself independent of Russian gas supplies.

In his speech, the Chancellor also referred to the European dimension of these terminals, through which neighboring countries without their own coastline are to be supplied.

Conversely, Germany also benefited.

Scholz refers to the savings in gas consumption in other countries, from which Germany, the largest consumer in particular, has benefited.

No mention was made of the LNG terminals in other countries, which in recent months have helped significantly to fill the gas storage facilities in Germany, where there have been plans for an LNG terminal for fifty years, but they have repeatedly failed.

Against the backdrop of the Höegh Esperanza

The event reaches its climax shortly after midday: the Chancellor's appearance in front of the backdrop of the Höegh Esperanza.

The entire planning was based on this photo motif and just in time for the release of the cameras, individual rays of sunshine timidly broke through the dense fog in the Jade estuary.

The horn of the Heligoland sounds, the ship Höegh Esperanza, secured by several police ships, greets back with a dull and powerful sound.