
Starting next week, Austria will have the partially unused Haidach gas storage facility on the Bavarian border filled. The Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, which owns part of the huge underground storage facility north of Salzburg, recently stopped using Haidach.
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The regulatory authority E-Control has now commissioned the co-operator RAG Austria to market part of the storage capacities – a total of 14 terawatt hours (TWh) of working gas volume – the Austrian Ministry of the Environment and Energy announced on Tuesday in Vienna. This corresponds to two thirds of Haidach’s capacity. It is expected that customers will start storing gas on August 1st.
“Full storage tanks are our insurance for the coming winter,” explained Minister Leonore Gewessler. “It is therefore of central importance that all storage facilities in Austria are also filled.” The filling of Haidach contributes significantly to the achievement of the Austrian storage target.
“We have decided that all gas storage facilities on Austrian territory must be connected to our network,” the newspaper quoted the Austrian Minister for Climate Protection and Energy, Leonore Gewessler, as saying before. “This decision is final,” she said.
As a result, operators who do not use their capacity lose their access. The Haidach gas storage facility is a joint project of RAG Austria with the Gazprom subsidiaries Astora and GSA and the German gas trader Wingas.
Austria is highly dependent on Russian energy imports and is therefore, like Germany, under great pressure due to the lack of gas supplies. In the course of the curtailed Russian gas supplies, Austria had already decided in June to reactivate a coal-fired power plant that had been shut down. Imports via terminals for landing liquid gas on the German coast are also being considered.
Last week, Austria’s Energy Minister said in an interview with the “Tagesspiegel” that the current gas crisis can only be overcome “if we show solidarity”.
Austria is dependent on pipeline capacities “so that we can be supplied with gas via other countries”. Austria has large storage facilities for this, other countries have none at all, they are dependent on their country.
Bavaria’s Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger meanwhile reacted calmly to Austria’s announcement. “It is important that the memory is finally filled quickly,” said the Free Voter boss to “BR”.