Europe’s economy, currencies and industries are in free fall, plunging toward “economic wasteland” status that’s less than a year away if natural gas supplies from Russia aren’t quickly restored. That’s the conclusion of numerous experts who have spoken to Natural News over the last two weeks, including war correspondent Michael Yon, Finnish economist Tuomas Malinen, global agricultural trends researcher David Dubyne, and Italian-American author Leo Zagami.
The situation is so dire that Germany chemical giant BASF — is now threatening to shut down operations for industrial plants that have run continuously since the 1960s.
As explained by author Philip Oltermann in a UK Guardian article entitled, “How gas rationing at Germany’s BASF plant could plunge Europe into crisis,” BASF is close to shutting down its massive chemical facilities in Germany due to a lack of natural gas. But shutting down production might be permanent, since no one knows if the plants can ever resume operations after a shutdown, since the very act of shutting the system down may break it.
BASF is critical to the world’s supply chain for fertilizer, petroleum refining, medicines, plastics, consumer products, industrial materials and more. If BASF were to go down, Western Europe’s industrial economy would rapidly collapse into ruin, and the global supply chain crisis would dramatically worsen far beyond anything we saw due to covid lockdowns.
To understand all this, first consider this March, 2022 Reuters article, “BASF says it would stop output if gas supplies fell to half its needs.” That article explains:
Germany’s BASF (BASFn.DE) said on Wednesday it would have to stop production if natural gas supplies fell to less than half its needs, as the world’s largest chemicals group warned of the damage to its operations from Europe’s power crunch.
The article reveals that BASF not only uses natural gas as its energy source for chemical manufacturing, but that the hydrocarbons in natural gas are the feed stock for critical chemical production such as ammonia (NH3) which must have hydrogen (H) from hydrocarbon molecules. You can’t simply replace natural gas with electricity, since electricity contains no hydrogen. Thus, wind and solar power can never replace natural gas in industry and manufacturing, including for fertilizer production, plastics and more. As Reuters explains:
Astonishingly, BASF warns that if it were to shutter operations, no one knows whether it could be restarted:
With large parts of the verbund site having run around the clock since the 1960s, BASF says it is unclear if production could simply be restarted afterwards or if the drop of pressure would cause some machinery to break.
“The consequences of a shutdown at Ludwigshafen would be far-reaching, not just in Europe’s largest economy but the entire continent,” writes The Guardian. A shutdown of BASF would mean the closing down of automobile manufacturing, consumer products, agricultural chemicals, sterilization chemicals for hospitals and much more.
Across Western Europe, ammonia production is already down by 70%, which will have devastating repercussions on spring planting in 2023 (expect mass famine across Europe throughout 2023 – 2024). Metals smelting operations are more than 50% shut down, and an industry group called Eurometaux has warned that without immediate government intervention (i.e. bailout money), Europe faces “permanent deindustrialization,” meaning it becomes an economic wasteland.
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