Status: 09/02/2022 11:55 a.m
Gas deliveries through the Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream 1 have been announced again from Saturday morning. But it remains uncertain whether gas will really flow to Germany again after the end of the maintenance work.
After the end of a three-day delivery stop, gas deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline have been announced for Saturday morning. This is the result of preliminary data from the operator of the gas pipeline, Nord Stream AG, which has been published on its website. According to this, gas deliveries are scheduled again from Saturday morning, 2 a.m.
Nord Stream 1 residual risk remains
The so-called nominations for gas total 14,437,507 kilowatt hours per hour (kWh/h) from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. on Saturday. Nominations are essentially capacity requests for gas transport. It is therefore preliminary information for gas network operators so that they can transport significant quantities.
Such nominations are subject to change until shortly before actual delivery. Most importantly, they can be changed by the supplier if necessary. Therefore, it remains uncertain before the weekend whether gas will actually flow through Nord Stream 1 again tomorrow. “The network data suggests that it does, but until the gas actually flows, it remains a risk,” emphasizes Craig Erlam of broker Oanda.
No more Russian gas since Wednesday
The scope of the nominations corresponds to the deliveries before the interruption, i.e. around 20 percent of the maximum possible quantity and thus 33 million cubic meters of natural gas daily. The data published so far only show the time up to 6 a.m. on Saturday morning, since that is when a new gas day begins.
Before the interruption in gas supplies from August 31 to September 2 due to maintenance work announced by the Russian state-owned company Gazprom, bookings had fallen to zero. Since Wednesday morning, no gas has flowed through the last most important pipeline for Russian gas to Germany.
Gas supply as a weapon of war?
Russia blames technical problems due to Western sanctions and refers to the necessary maintenance work on a compressor station. Only one turbine is currently working there, according to Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov. However, this reading is not shared by the EU. Germany and France, for example, accuse the leadership in Moscow of using the gas supply as a weapon of war. The head of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller, had recently expressed doubts about the reason for the delivery stop.
After the attack on Ukraine and sanctions from the West, Moscow cut or stopped gas supplies to several countries. In connection with the throttling to a fifth of the maximum output, Gazprom had also referred to technical reasons that the federal government, among others, had questioned.