Gas price exploded on both the European and Bucharest stock exchanges, but in Romania the effects are produced by different factors, such as the lack of gas, analyst Dumitru Chisăliță told Energynomics. On Monday, the spot price of the Romanian Commodity Exchange “jumped” the threshold of 400 lei/MWh, a much higher increase than the forward price of the TTF exchange, where the increase on Monday was 4% at the date of our analysis, up to 58 euros/MWh.
“I don’t think there will be a real crisis, but the increases are really, really high. Two or three weeks ago, all the price analysis and forecasting houses – Wood Mackenzie, BRD, ING, showed decreasing trends for February, but after Trump came into power, all the forecasts were blown up… You can’t make any forecasts anymore,” said Chisăliță, president of the Intelligent Energy Association (AEI).
He said that the factors determining prices are different in Romania, compared to Europe, for the most part.
“There were two big problems that determined this increase: there was the unplanned stoppage of extraction from the Shah Deniz perimeter in Azerbaijan, which blocked important flows between Southern and Central and Eastern Europe for almost two weeks. On top of that, the second stoppage, of the LNG terminal in Alaxandropolis, in Greece, was superimposed”.
The analyst also explained to us that the US policy of imposing new trade taxes will also influence the price of gas, and of goods in general.
“There is also this fear of traders that US policy will influence the price, through reciprocity, this for the TTF and the Vienna Stock Exchange. For Romania, the problem is that we don’t have gas.” Although we have full storages, the consumption curve does not allow extraction from some storages except under certain conditions, while other storages are already empty. “We have Ghercești, which is a very large storage, but where there are no compression facilities. Then, it is very much influenced by the pressure in the pipes and by local demand: if there is high local demand and low pressure, it can discharge, if not, there is nothing you can do about it. Also, Sărmășel, which is the second largest storage, and which is dependent on consumption – as such, we have gas, but we sit and look at it. And Bilciurești and Urziceni were finished, especially in November and December, and additional exploitation continued in January, and as such, there is little gas, from a storage perspective. Domestic production is insufficient, and hence these fantastic prices – in two or three weeks the price on the BRM has doubled.”
Although Russian gas is also arriving in Europe and including Romania, it is not possible to know exactly how much. Therefore, it is not known to what extent the influence on prices comes from Moscow.
“This is speculation, that Russian gas is coming to Romania. It is clear that Russian gas is also coming to Europe, but there is no way to know how much. The gas coming from Hungary can come from Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, you don’t actually know exactly”.
The current crisis may be long-term?
The AEI expert also claims that the current price trend may turn into a short-term crisis, and not at the level of the one in 2021-2023.
“A year ago, when the gas crisis ended, when the price started to fall in Europe – this was happening in mid-2023 – I said that such crises would be frequent and increasingly frequent. It is possible that we are facing a different kind of crisis, a stage, and they will be more frequent, because we are hanging by a very thin thread, and then any sensitivity in the market determines, unfortunately, such fluctuations. But I do not think that we can discuss a similar crisis in 2021-2022. We should not equate what is happening now with what happened then,” concluded Dumitru Chisăliță.
