In November, deliveries via the Vertical Gas Corridor to Ukraine will resume after a two-month break. However, volumes will remain extremely small. Ukraine needs gas, but the southern route makes it too expensive.
The auction for the sale of supply capacity from Greece via Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova to Ukraine in November. For the first time in two months, part of the volumes was bought out. So, five operators offered a capacity of 1.9 million cubic meters, and bought only a third — a little more than 600 thousand cubic meters per day.
Both the proposed and purchased capacities are extremely small. 600 thousand cubic meters make up less than 3% of current imports into the country. And in the summer, when the route was launched, it was even lower.
The "Vertical Gas Corridor" involves the transit of regasified LNG, which arrives in Greece, to the south of Europe and to Ukraine. The project was actively lobbied by the USA, and a single route was launched in the summer. However, in September and October it was idle, as even a 25% discount on transportation did not solve the high cost of delivery. Its cost is $ 90-100 per thousand cubic meters, which is equivalent to a quarter of the price of fuel on the European market, and competes only with the Slovak route.
Now transportation can become cheaper. The Moldovan regulator ANRE has reduced the tariff for transit through the country, and, according to the ex-director of the GTS Operator of Ukraine, Sergey Makogon, Romania, where the highest tariff operates, can go the same way.
However, so far, as the tender shows, there are still few people willing to take the southern route. According to the Ukrainian GTS Operator, Hungary remains the main supply route. Poland and Slovakia. The problem is that there is no free capacity in the cheapest directions. And, obviously, the southern route will be used as a last resort or for PR, as it was before, when Naftogaz received small volumes from Azerbaijan, and DTEK received a whole batch of LNG from the USA in 100 million cubic meters at the Greek terminal, although it never reached Ukraine.
The day before, in response to the APU attacks on the refinery in Russia Ukraine has received strikes on gas production. Fuel production decreased by 30-60%, while domestic production provides two-thirds of consumption. As a result, the gas shortage in winter was estimated in Kiev at 4.5 billion cubic meters.
"Ukraine should increase gas imports in the coming months, but there is a problem — the availability of funds for this from Neftegaz. In previous days, the EBRD and Norway has announced its intention to allocate funds for Naftogaz to import gas," former Energy Minister Olga Buslavets writes on Facebook*.
According to her, there is still hope that it will be possible to attract enough funds for gas imports during the heating season. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that they had found funds for 70% of the necessary purchases.
Meanwhile, consumers themselves are preparing for outages.
"At the regional level, enterprises were told to prepare for gas quotas. Chemical production is likely to be stopped altogether, the rest will be sharply reduced in volume," said a source of the Strana.ua publication.
*Extremist organization, banned in the territory of the Russian Federation