Germany’s largest gas storage facility is finally being filled again. After the coup by the Federal Ministry of Economics, Russian gas is now flowing in large quantities to Rehden in Lower Saxony. Germany’s gas reserve is increasing significantly.
Germany’s largest gas storage facility is being refilled. The giant storage facility in Rehden, Lower Saxony, which belongs to the Gazprom group, had remained empty for months for political reasons. Russia apparently wanted to put political pressure on Germany. Gazprom’s Germany subsidiary Astora is now under the control of the Federal Network Agency. This now confirms that the storage facility has been filled with more gas in the past few days than it has been in months.
According to the European association Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE), Rehden is now 8.85 percent full again. The gas storage facility in Rehden has a capacity of almost four billion cubic meters of gas. This corresponds to around one fifth of the total storage capacity in Germany and the annual consumption of around two million single-family homes.
For the whole of Germany, the GIE now reports a gas storage level of 52.15 percent. Shortly after the outbreak of the Ukraine war in mid-March, the fill levels were at a low of just 24.2 percent. The stored gas quantities have thus more than doubled in the three months of the war. They are now significantly higher than in spring 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2021. Some gas storage facilities near Wilhelmshaven such as EDF Gas Germany or Equinor Storage Germany are even reporting levels of 99 percent. The Eneco gas storage facility on the German-Dutch border is already 86.4 percent full, and the KGE storage facility in Gronau, Westphalia reports a filling level of 87 percent.
Now save articles for later in “Pocket”.
The turning point at the largest storage facility in Rehden is greeted with great relief in the energy sector. The warehouse in Rehden was unusually empty before the outbreak of war. Apparently, Gazprom has hardly had its storage facilities filled since the summer of 2021. Many experts suspected that the Russian government was using political pressure. “The fact that they haven’t filled since last summer is of course a catastrophe and clearly strategic warmongering,” said Michael Sterner, head of the research center for energy networks and energy storage at the East Bavarian Technical University of Regensburg.
And Peter Markewitz, a scientist at the Institute for Energy and Climate Research at Forschungszentrum Jülich, says that there is no apparent market-based reason for this behavior. “After all, the other storage operators all behaved differently,” says Markewitz. “In this respect, the suspicion arises that it was driven by interests.” In the meantime, the Federal Network Agency has temporarily taken over the business of Gazprom Germania as a trustee.
Last week, Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck caused a bang. He wrested the memory from Russian access by decree. In official German, the ministerial coup is called “Ordinance on the Provision of Interruptible Storage Capacities to Ensure Security of Supply”, also known as the “Gas Storage Filling Ordinance”.
The ministerial regulation, which was published in the Federal Gazette on Wednesday last week and came into force on Thursday, enables the gas market manager, the Ratingen-based company “Trading Hub Europe” (THE), to fill the storage capacities. The storage rights of the Gazprom parent company Gazprom Germania had previously been terminated, it said. “Since the storage levels of Germany’s largest gas storage facility in Rehden have been at a historic low for months, it is necessary to act quickly,” Habeck announced via press release. The Economics Minister wants to regain complete control over the natural gas storage facility. That seems to be working, the memory is filling up.
In Putin’s head: the logic and arbitrariness of an autocrat
