“Russia’s Gazprom cut gas supplies to Austrian energy company OMV hours after Vienna said Russia had warned it would cut off the flow.”, — write: www.epravda.com.ua
Russia’s Gazprom cut gas supplies to Austrian energy company OMV hours after Vienna said Russia had warned it would cut off the flow.
This is reported by Reuters.
Austria on Friday statedthat Moscow has informed it that the gas will be cut off from Saturday, November 16, following an arbitration award in favor of OMV, Austria’s largest energy supplier, due to Gazprom’s failure to meet gas supply obligations to its German subsidiary.
Austrian energy regulator E-Control said on Saturday that Gazprom’s supplies to OMV stopped at 6 a.m. local time (7 a.m. Kyiv), adding that prices and supplies for Austrian customers remained stable.
OMV is trying to collect from Gazprom 230 million euros in damages awarded in the arbitration.
Gazprom said that on Saturday it will send 42.4 million cubic meters of gas to Europe via Ukraine, that is, the same volume as on Friday.
Flows to Slovakia from Ukraine were steady, but nominations for flows to Austria from Slovakia were about 16% below the average for the month, data from gas transmission system operator Eustream showed.
OMV usually accounts for about 40% of Russian gas flows through Ukraine, or about 17 million cubic meters per day.
One of Russia’s last major gas routes to Europe, the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pomari-Uzhgorod pipeline through Ukraine, is to be shut down later this year because Kyiv does not want to extend a five-year transit agreement that supplies North Siberian gas to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria.
Without Austria, significant volumes of Russian gas will reach only two European countries – Hungary and Slovakia, in the case of Hungary through a pipeline that passes mainly through Turkey.
According to Reuters, in 2023, Russia sent about 15 billion cubic meters of gas through Ukraine, which is about 8% of the peak flows of Russian gas to Europe via various routes in 2018-2019.
According to the International Energy Agency, in 2023, the Ukrainian transit route satisfied 65% of gas demand in Austria and its eastern neighbors – Hungary and Slovakia.
We will remind:
European Commission raised expectations regarding the cost of gas in Europe this year by 9.7%, and by 2025 – by 14.4%.