As we know, there's no Russian pipeline gas sales. Estonia and Finland were building floating LNG terminals, one in each country but also collaborating. It is expensive. A floating LNG terminal is basically a rented LNG tanker that has gasification equipment onboard. It's next to a pier with a natural gas pipe. In the end it was placed in Finland. The Estonian terminal construction was halted. Tanker is rented from USA. LNG is brought to the floating terminal, gasified, put to pipe network. There's this pipe between Finland and Estonia too.
Finland actually buys and ships the LNG for the terminal from ... Russia! This is because of existing contracts that can't be breached because there's no EU wide sanction for LNG buying from Russia.
Finland does not heat any houses with gas (There was a little bit in district heating). Also Finland has energy abundance since Olkiluoto 3 coming online and massive amounts of wind built in the last years. Also hydro and great grid connections to Sweden, Norway and Estonia. I think there has been very little use for the LNG in Finland.
Estonia is still grid connected to Finland and grid and gas connected to Latvia. Closest LNG terminal in the pipeline network is in Klaipeda, Lithuania. There's also the aborted LNG terminal in Estonia's Paldiski that's relatively far along.
So the real target of this attack could be Estonia and Baltic states in general.
Baltic states are trying to decouple from Russia's electrical grid [1]. Latvia wants to move fast, Estonia is asking for more time. Concerningly, Estonia signed an agreement recently with Finland for a new submarine cable ("Estlink 3") to import more power (as Finland has an excess due to their new nuclear generator recently coming online, current interconnector runs maxed out most of the time at ~1GW). This infra may be at go forward risk from Russia, making the investment questionable at this time (unless the route and burial depth can sufficiently defend against a nation state threat actor).
Baltic States can disconnect already in case of an emergency. The infrastructure is ready, several tests have been conducted. Lithuania wanted to disconnect already, but Estonia pushed for more conservative approach: they want more synchronous condensers to handle a higher number of possible simultaneous failures in the system. It's a technical debate whether that is necessary (Lithuanian operator thinks it isn't): the probability of such failure is already very small, but the Estonian operator wants to reduce it a bit further.
Different company, called Gasum has "take or pay type" type LNG contract with Russian Gasprom. Gasum must buy a certain amount of LNG from Russia every year. They are contractually obligated to pay for the gas even of they don't take it.
Neither Natural gas nor LNG are subject to EU sanctions. Sanctions would be legal cause to end the contract.
As we know, there's no Russian pipeline gas sales. Estonia and Finland were building floating LNG terminals, one in each country but also collaborating. It is expensive. A floating LNG terminal is basically a rented LNG tanker that has gasification equipment onboard. It's next to a pier with a natural gas pipe. In the end it was placed in Finland. The Estonian terminal construction was halted. Tanker is rented from USA. LNG is brought to the floating terminal, gasified, put to pipe network. There's this pipe between Finland and Estonia too.
Finland actually buys and ships the LNG for the terminal from ... Russia! This is because of existing contracts that can't be breached because there's no EU wide sanction for LNG buying from Russia.
Finland does not heat any houses with gas (There was a little bit in district heating). Also Finland has energy abundance since Olkiluoto 3 coming online and massive amounts of wind built in the last years. Also hydro and great grid connections to Sweden, Norway and Estonia. I think there has been very little use for the LNG in Finland.
Estonia is still grid connected to Finland and grid and gas connected to Latvia. Closest LNG terminal in the pipeline network is in Klaipeda, Lithuania. There's also the aborted LNG terminal in Estonia's Paldiski that's relatively far along.
So the real target of this attack could be Estonia and Baltic states in general.