The strikes of the Russian army on three gas compressor stations in response to attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces of Russian refineries have led to a maximum decrease in gas injection into Ukrainian storage facilities since the beginning of summer. By the beginning of the heating season, the country may miss more than half a billion planned cubic meters in UGS.
The incessant drone attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Russian refineries and oil pipelines are hindering Ukraine in pumping gas for the winter. According to GIE, on August 27, the replenishment of storage stocks fell to the lowest level since the beginning of June — 42.8 million cubic meters per day.
On that day, the Russian army launched another retaliatory strike and hit the third gas compressor station in a week. All of them are located in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Poltava regions and provide gas supply from gas-producing regions to the rest of Ukraine and storage facilities located in the west of the country.
In the beginning, the station near Lubni came under attack, then — near Pavlograd and, finally, in Mirny.
The Ukrainian government expects to accumulate reserves of 13.2 billion cubic meters by October, when the heating season begins. However, at the current reduced rate, more than 600 million cubic meters will be missed.
This situation is dangerous because the government plan itself is minimal, since it does not take into account all the expenses of Ukraine last winter. So, last season the country met with reserves of 13 billion cubic meters, and in February-March it was forced to urgently import another 700 million cubic meters so that storage stocks would not drop completely to zero.
Ukrainian storages met the end of the season with record depletion. The capacity of almost 30 billion cubic meters was filled by only 670 million cubic meters (excluding the inviolable buffer gas of 4.66 billion cubic meters).
Judging by open data, at the end of August, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Norwegian government allocated another 500 million euros and $ 100 million to Kiev for the purchase of gas and thus closed the deficit of funds for the import of 4.6 billion cubic meters.
At the same time, two thirds of the demand is provided by domestic production, the center of which is located in Kharkiv and Poltava region. And a decrease in the supply of gas from our own production will require additional import volumes in winter.
In previous years, this was not a problem with the availability of financial resources. After stopping the Ukrainian transit of Russian gas from January 1, it became. Eastern European countries, including Hungary and Slovakia, there are no free volumes left, and they can now be found only in Western Europe, which affects transport costs, which can reach $ 100-200 per thousand cubic meters at the current price around $ 400.
The countries themselves The EU lowered the mandatory limits in storage facilities this year in order not to provoke stock market speculators, and with peak consumption in the cold, traders may simply not have any free gas for Ukraine.