Romania will not be able to cover 20% of its gas consumption in February, according to Transgaz data, Dumitru Chisalita, president of the Intelligent Energy Association, said on Tuesday, while Secretary of State George Niculescu said the Ministry of Energy did not raise this issue for now.

“If we look at the Transgaz website, we see that gas consumption in February was of between 76 and 78 million cubic meters per day in the last ten years. On the same page, we see that what is reserved for the same month means 46 million, so 32 million cm are not currently reserved. In addition to the fact that 41% of a potential application in February does not exist, summing up all the technical capabilities that Transgaz currently has available we would not have 20% gas for such a peak, which has been present in Romania for the last ten years, as Transgaz data show,” said Chisăliţă, during the Natural Gas Forum, organized by Financial Intelligence and the Intelligent Energy Association.

In his turn, George Niculescu, Secretary of State in the Ministry of Energy, was asked, during the same event, which will be the consumers that will be disconnected in case there will be problems with the power supply.

“At the moment there is no list of first to be cut off (interruptible). I think there is no problem at the moment of disconnecting any consumer. In the meeting of the winter command of today (Tuesday – e.n.) we will make a recap and we will monitor very very carefully the situation whenever it is the case, weekly, of course. I don’t think that the problem is posed at the moment of interruptible consumers,” Niculescu showed, according to Agerpres.

“In September we also saw the same estimate for Q4 2021 and yet we saw that capacity was reserved for the monthly period. I also notice a tendency of gas importers to reserve their capacity not long before, quarterly, at lower costs, but prefer to do so by reserving monthly capacity, even if it is a higher cost for them. I assume that this strategy comes from their desire to maximize their gas prices, and in this sense the Ministry of Energy has no responsibilities to intervene in trade relations,”the secretary of state said.