In a new proposal to be presented at the meeting of the EU Council’s Energy Working Group on Thursday 27 March, the Polish Presidency of the EU Council is further amending the European Commission’s proposal to extend the validity of the Gas Storage Regulation (see EUROPE 13593/11) to give Member States greater flexibility.
On 19 March (see EUROPE 13601/12), the Presidency presented the national delegations with a more flexible deadline for achieving the objective of filling gas tanks to 90%, which until now has been set at 1 November, replacing this fixed deadline with a date that would fall “at any time during the period from 1 October to 1 December”.
However, France and Germany, formally supported by the Netherlands, Slovakia and Hungary, have asked to go further by also modifying the filling percentage, requesting a margin of 10 percentage points (pp), according to several sources.
Taking this request partially into account, the new proposal from the Polish Presidency introduces the possibility of deviating by up to 5 pp from this annual target, in consultation with the European Commission, “if market conditions are unfavourable to the filling of underground gas storage facilities”.
This possibility could also be offered to a Member State if “its national gas production exceeds its average annual consumption over the previous two years” and if “the specific technical characteristics of an underground storage located on its territory require a slow injection rate resulting in an exceptionally long injection period of more than 115 days”.
According to one source, several Member States (Austria, supported by Slovakia, Hungary and Latvia) are also in favour of lowering the target for filling reservoirs equivalent to 35% of the country’s annual consumption for countries with very large storage capacities, by lowering the target to 25%.
The regulation, which was amended in 2022 during the energy crisis, stipulates that if a Member State has significant storage capacity (greater than its gas demand), the obligation to fill underground stocks will be limited to a volume corresponding to 35% of the country’s average annual gas consumption over the last five years.
The Polish proposal states that Member States may decide to deviate by up to 1.94 percentage points below this volume, “if conditions are unfavourable”.
To see the new proposal from the Polish Presidency: https://aeur.eu/f/g34 (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)