Ukraine Runs Down Storage
Gas reserves in the underground gas storage facilities (UGS) of Ukraine have fallen to 9.237bn m³, operator Ukrtransgaz said March 7.
Ukraine began to withdraw gas from the UGS October 24, 2017, when the reserves were 16.974bn m³, which is about half where they would be at the start of winter, if relations with Russia were normal. Since January 1, the country has withdrawn b5.456bn m3 according to official statistics. The facility on the far left of the chart below is by far the largest and is in the far west of the country and used to back up supplies from Russia.
(Source: Ukrtransgaz)
Ukraine stopped importing Russian gas in November 2015 and it had expected to receive 4bn m3/yr of Gazprom’s gas this year starting on March 1, following the Stockholm arbitration court’s decision. But Russia refused to deliver and announced that it would terminate both the gas supply and the gas transit deals with Ukraine. It has also consistently failed to maintain pipeline pressure in the import pipelines used to transit gas to customers beyond Ukraine, forcing Ukrtransgaz to provide gas for that too, the Naftogaz subsidiary has said.
Naftogaz Ukrainy and Poland’s PGNiG have signed a contract for urgent gas supplies following Gazprom’s decision. Ukraine’s gas transmission system (GTS) was fully functional on March 3.
The government in Kiev also successfully appealed to the country to turn down domestic and some commercial boilers. The Coolitdown initiative enabled a 14% cut in demand in Ukraine's major cities on March 2 compared with March 1, Naftogaz said.