Page 11 - EurOil Week 25 2022

EurOil PIPELINES & TRANSPORT EurOil

TurkStream to shut down for maintenance

on June 21-28

TURKEY THE TurkStream pipeline that delivers Rus- its own annual maintenance between July 11
sian gas to Turkey and Europe via the Black and July 21, Gazprom has previously said. In the
The downtime comes Sea is due to shut down for one week of meantime, Russia claims that transit capacity via
amid additional repairs on June 21, Russian state-owned gas Ukraine has been limited by Ukrainian gas trans-
constraints at Nord supplier Gazprom reported on its Telegram mission operator GTSOU’s decision last week to
Stream 1. channel on June 18. halt flow via the Sokhranivka route because of
Gazprom annually closes down the 31.5 Russian activity. But Kyiv insists that the closure
bcm per year TurkStream and its other Euro- has not affected overall transit capacity.
pean export pipelines for seasonal maintenance. Meanwhile, Russia’s other main route for gas
However, the upcoming shutdown comes deliveries to Europe through Poland, the Yamal-Eu-
at a time when capacity at Gazprom’s Nord rope pipeline, has mainly been flowing in reverse
Stream 1 pipeline to Germany is significantly since December, owing to reduced Russian exports.
restricted, with Gazprom citing technical diffi- Poland has severed its intergovernmental agree-
culties including the failure of Siemens to return ment with Russia that enables Russian gas transit
equipment on time to the Portovaya compressor through its territory to take place.
station that had been sent off to repairs. The Ger- “All interested parties agreed to the gas trans-
man engineering group has said it cannot return portation suspension in advance,” Gazprom said
the equipment because of sanctions. of the downtime at TurkStream. While one of the
Gazprom issued announcements last week pipeline’s 15.75 bcm per year strings delivers gas
saying it would be slashing gas flow via Nord to Europe, the other enters Bulgaria at Strandzha.
Stream 1 by as much as 60%, to only 67 mcm From there, the gas is typically delivered to Greece,
per day, because of the problems at the Portovaya North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia and
facility on Russia’s Baltic coast. However, the Herzegovina and Hungary. However, Bulgaria had
disruption coincides with Germany, France and its supply cut off in late April after refusing to com-
Italy endorsing Ukraine’s bid for EU member- ply with the Kremlin’s decree on sending payments
ship. All three countries have reported drops in for shipments to accounts set up at Gazprombank,
gas deliveries from Russia. where they can be converted into rubles for trans-
Nord Stream 1 is set to be taken offline for fer to Gazprom ™

Week 25 23•June•2022 www. NEWSBASE .com P11