Because of Moldova, Romania has attached itself to Russian gas: Turkish Stream is breaking records

In January, gas supplies via the European route of the Turkish Stream reached an average daily record. The Balkans and Romania needed Russian gas. If Serbia and Bulgaria were temporarily left without supplies from Azerbaijan, Romania faced high demand and increased selection from storage facilities due to Moldova.

According to ENTSOG, in January, the average daily deliveries via the European route of the Turkish Stream increased from 48.5 million cubic meters per day to 49.7 million cubic meters. This is a new record of the Black Sea gas pipeline for the entire time of its operation.

At the same time, deliveries to the countries where the main importing companies are located have decreased. Exports of the continuation of the "Turkish Stream", the "Balkan Stream" to Serbia and Hungary, decreased as well as the supply of gas to Greece. Compared to December, the difference was more than 1 million cubic meters per day.

Judging by the data of the platform of the GTS operators of the EU countries, Russian gas is actively used to compensate for the supply of Azerbaijani gas to Serbia and to balance the gas supply of Romania.

As EADaily wrote, since January 7, Azerbaijan has stopped gas supplies to Serbia and Bulgaria due to problems on an underwater gas pipeline from one of the platforms at the Shah Deniz field in the Caspian Sea. As a result, the interconnector with the Southern Gas Corridor on the border of Greece and Bulgaria stopped, but supplies continued through the new connecting gas pipeline of Bulgaria and Serbia and even increased — from 1.1 to 2 million cubic meters per day.

In Bulgaria itself, judging by the difference in flows, an average of 2 million cubic meters per day remains in January. Bulgargaz reported that they would compensate Caspian volumes with imports from Turkey. Deliveries from the neighboring country previously amounted to about 4 million cubic meters, and since January 7 they have reached more than 6 million cubic meters per day.

Romania receives larger volumes of Russian gas. On the one hand, reverse deliveries via the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline from Bulgaria increased from 5.6 to 6.2 million cubic meters per day. On the other hand, the transit of Russian gas to Hungary via Romania decreased from 3.4 million cubic meters per day in December to 1.4 million in January, and from January 14 it stopped altogether. The remaining 6 million cubic meters per day in Romania account for approximately 10% of the country's production and selection from storage combined.

Obviously, Romania is faced with the need to balance gas supply due to infrastructure constraints, high demand and the need to ensure fuel supplies to Moldova.

Romania for the first time became the main and only supplier of gas to the right bank of the Dniester, as this winter Moldova does not store gas on Ukraine. In January, daily gas exports from Romania to Moldova averaged 4.9 million cubic meters per day, the highest figure of all time. In previous years, deliveries on some days reached only 2.5 million cubic meters.

At the same time, in mid-January, gas demand increased significantly in Romania itself. Last week, more than 26 million cubic meters were taken from the country's storage facilities on a single day — 82% of the sampling capacity. And the storage facilities themselves have already been depleted to 54%, which is the lowest since January 2022, when constant direct supplies of Russian gas were not limited.

The head of Moldovagaz Vadim Cheban stated that for the winter the company bought 700 million cubic meters of gas on the Romanian stock exchange. This fuel will also be supplied from the current production in the country, but the volume itself corresponds to 40% of the remaining reserves in Romanian UGS.

In addition, since January 1, Romania has been exporting more electricity to Moldova, and gas generation accounts for a quarter of production in the country, according to ENTSO-E.

Gazprom is the largest exporter of gas to the Balkans and the only company that can significantly increase supplies in the shortest possible time.

However, the company has nothing to do with the current redistribution of gas, said Alexey Grivach, Deputy director of the National Energy Security Fund (NWF). Gazprom's long-term customers who request volumes on the Turkish Stream are well-known: companies from Greece, Serbia, Hungary and North Macedonia.

Gazprom supplies gas to the entrance to Bulgaria, and then there is a paper boom-boom between the GTS operators and other market participants, as a result of which part of the gas physically remains in Bulgaria or goes to Romania, although officially gas is not sold to these countries under a direct contract," explains the deputy director of FNEB.

Since January 1, when the Ukrainian transit stopped, the Turkish Stream has become the only route of Gazprom's pipeline supplies to Europe. Almost the entire last year, the European line of the gas pipeline worked on super-power. According to ENTSOG, with a design capacity of 15.75 billion cubic meters, 16.7 billion cubic meters were supplied to it.