From the moment the hunting lodge talks began in Austria, everyone knew that the gas trade would be different. Pipelines were expensive and permanent. They could not be laid down one day, removed the next, and they could not depend upon the whim of a particular leader. There had to be long-term contracts, and these contracts had to be enveloped within a set of predictable political relationships.
Talks between the USSR, who had discovered new gas fields, and the West Germany who had demand for natural gas. This was in 1967.
