Gas imports keep flowing into Hungary this morning

HUNGARY - In Brief 05 Sep 2022 by Istvan Racz

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Now that Russia has decided to keep the Nordstream 1 gas pipeline to Germany closed despite earlier announcements, and European gas prices jumped by 25% this morning as a result, it seems important to note that gas imports keep flowing into Hungary from four directions - Serbia, Austria, Croatia and Romania - just as usual. Apparently, Turkstream, arriving at the country's borders from the south (Serbia) remains fully operational. As we are writing these lines, Hungary is consuming 530k cubic meters of gas per hour, domestic production is 170kcm/h. Subtracting these from imports, 1.142 million cm of gas is going into storage on a per hour basis. This is once again quite normal. On September 3, Hungary's gas reserves in storage reached 4.08 billion cubic meters, or 39-40% of its annual use of gas. So the country is very close to being able to survive the winter period by just relying on its existing reserves in storage. Unfortunately: (a) the average situation in the EU is much worse than this, with about 23-24% of expected annual gas consumption in storage currently; (b) the EU does not have storage facilities bigger than 28-29% of its annual consumption (this is 61% in Hungary); and (c) the EU Commission is maintaining its proposal to introduce a price cap on gas imported from Russia, which may almost automatically lead to the discontinuation of Russian shipments to all EU members trying to enforce the planned measure. The EU keeps claiming, at various levels of its decision-making administration, that it is perfectly prepared for a potential full termination of Russian gas shipments. We are far from taking these statements as absolutely correct. The EU and its member...