Sursa foto: Unsplash / Junho Kwon
A month before the end of the gas injection cycle, Romania has already started to extract gas from storage. As of yesterday, 28 September, companies that have stored gas have started to extract it, up to a limit of 2.3 million cubic meters. Today, 29 September, extraction has risen to 3 million cubic meters. At the same time, continuous storage is going on in parallel with extraction, 6 to 6.5 million cubic meters daily, Transgaz data show.
The fact that our country has already started extracting gas can be attributed to the fact that current production is not sufficient for consumption and imports are limited. Petrom and Romgaz wells extract about 20 million cubic meters a day. Imports remain at 5.8 million cubic meters a day, exclusively from Gazprom, via TurkStream and Bulgaria. As of yesterday, no more gas is coming in from Hungary (nor is it being exported), a route that has been used all this year both for exports – in fact, gas transit through Romania – and imports. The Hungarians have not booked any export capacity to Romania on the Arad-Szeged pipeline for October. They have not booked for imports either, and this has to do with the fact that, from 1 October, our neighbors will use the Serbian route to bring gas from the Russians, from Turk Stream.
A few days ago, Hungary and Gazprom signed a new long-term agreement – 15 years, for 4.5 billion cubic meters per year, and the director of the Russian company Alexei Miller said that from October, two routes will be used to bring in the goods: the one from Serbia, for 3.5 billion cubic meters, and the one from Austria, another 1 billion meters.
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So Hungary no longer needs the Romanian transit route to bring in gas on a long-term basis, which is bad news for Transgaz, which is deprived of the related transit tariffs. But it does not mean that Hungary cannot bring gas through Romania, it can do it, but only punctually, in conjunctural market situations, without this being predictable in the long term.
Romania’s annual production, shared almost equally between Romgaz and Petrom, is around 10 billion cubic meters. A further 1.5-2 billion cubic meters is imported from Russia. This year, imports will be even higher, because local production continues to fall due to the gradual depletion of fields and, on the other hand, because in the first part of the year, the Russians came with better prices than the local ones. Since the summer and up to now, imports have decreased in quantity, but continue at relatively high levels.
In an interview with Financialintelligence.ro, Russian Ambassador Valery Kuzmin said that Gazprom exported 350% more gas to Romania in the first part of September compared to the same period last year. Regarding the record gas prices in Romania and across the EU, the ambassador said that this cannot be blamed on Russia (whose deliveries to the EU were lower than last year), but on those countries that did not conclude long-term contracts with Gazprom and did not take care to fill their storage tanks in time.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out that gas prices in Europe have risen for those buyers who have not signed long-term contracts with Gazprom. Many European countries have such agreements. Two days ago, for example, Gazprom signed a 15-year contract with Hungary for the supply of 4.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year,” Kuzmin said.
Romania has about 2 billion cubic meters in storage, with a month to go before the end of the storage cycle. Last year, on 31 October, there were 3.1 billion cubic meters in storage, close to the maximum. At the current daily injection rate, we will probably not reach more than 2.2 billion cubic meters by the end of the month, which is more than 30% less than in 2020.
Edited for English