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Natural gas storage facility in Haidach: "Full storage facilities are our insurance for the winter"
Photo: Manfred Fesl / dpa
Starting next week, Austria will have the partially unused Haidach gas storage facility on the Bavarian border filled.
The Russian energy company Gazprom, which owns part of the huge underground storage facility north of Salzburg, had recently stopped using Haidach.
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 for the Environment and Energy announced.
This corresponds to two thirds of Haidach's capacity.
It is expected that customers will start storing gas on August 1st.
"Full storage is our insurance for the coming winter," said 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.
The government in Vienna had decided that all storage facilities in Austria must also be used.
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.
Connection to the Austrian grid planned
On Monday, top German politicians expressed concern that the impending connection of the storage facility to the Austrian grid – so far it has only been connected to the German one – could affect the interests of customers, especially in southern Germany.
Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) said: "If Bavaria, as the economically strongest federal state, is not sufficiently supplied, this will affect the economy as a whole.
If you cut off the South, you'll paralyze the whole country."
There is no threat of impairment, the ministry in Austria emphasized again on Tuesday.
As before, the memory can continue to be used by German and Austrian companies.
"We have always coordinated well with Germany," Gewessler said on Monday with a view of the Haidach storage facility.
The country had long decided to connect the underground storage facility, which was previously only connected to the German network, to the Austrian network as soon as possible.
"But that doesn't mean that one country wants to take gas away from another country."
Austria has large underground natural gas storage facilities.
According to E-Control, the strong expansion since 2007 was due to the demand from foreign companies such as Gazprom for additional storage capacities in Europe.
Natural gas price increases
Meanwhile, natural gas prices continued to rise following Russia's announcement of another cut.
The European future rose again on Tuesday by almost eleven percent to 196 euros per megawatt hour.
Just a few days after gas supplies resumed through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in the Baltic Sea, Gazprom announced on Monday that it would reduce pipeline utilization to 20 percent.
Sol/dpa/Reuters