Ukraine Ships More Gas During NS Maintenance

Russia’s Gazprom has submitted an increased order of 315mn m³ for daily gas transmission through Ukraine to the European Union, Ukraine's pipeline operator parent company Naftogaz Ukrainy said September 11. This is up 47mn m³ over the past week.

Naftogaz is ready to carry out the increased order in full, which Gazprom has requested to compensate for the planned 11-day outage of Nord Stream, despite the fact that the significant order fluctuations are not stipulated by the gas current transmission contract between Naftogaz and Gazprom, it said.

At most, Ukraine is able to ship 400mn m³/day to Europe, so there is theoretically room for even more.

According to Ukrtransgaz, the Ukrainian gas transportation system operator, Gazprom has not adhered to the requirement to keep up the gas pressure at Sudzha, the key entry point for gas from Russia. The pressure in the Russian gas transit system at the entry point to Ukraine currently stands at 57 atmospheres (57.75 bar), which is 3 atmospheres less than what is stipulated by the contract between Naftogaz and Gazprom.

In the first eight months of 2017, Ukraine transported 61.9bn m³ of Russian gas to customers in Europe, which was up 23.4% up on the same period last year and up 45.6% on the same period of 2015, it said.

Since the start of August, Gazprom has been able to use more of Nord Stream, following the late July lifting of a legal restriction on the use of Opal, one of the pipelines with which which Nord Stream is linked. This use is expected to continue for many months – at least until the European Court of Justice's final court ruling and possible thereafter, depending on the court's final decision.  

In 2016, Gazprom used the Ukrainian gas transmission system to deliver 46% (82.2bn m³ of 178.3bn m³) of gas to its clients in Europe.

William Powell

NB: All measurements are Russian cubic metres, which contain 93% of the energy in a standard cubic metre.