Russia’s state-owned Gazprom announced, on Monday, that it will stop one of the turbines at the Portovaya plant from Wednesday, July 27, which may reduce the quantities of natural gas distributed to Germany, via Nord Stream 1 to 33 million. cubic meters per day, much less than planned.
“The production capacity of the Portovaïa pressure plant will rise to 33 million cubic meters per day on July 27 at 07:00” (05:00 in Lisbon), the energy company said, i.e. about 20% of the gas pipeline capacity for 40% current.
The energy company’s announcement immediately increased natural gas prices in Europe by about 10%, according to the Dutch TTF Index, the benchmark for European markets.
The downtime was justified by the “technical conditions of the turbines” that required maintenance.
Russia had already scaled back its shipments twice in June, claiming the pipeline could not function normally without a turbine being repaired at Siemens plants in Canada that had not been delivered to Russia due to Western sanctions against Moscow. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Since then, Germany and Canada have agreed to take back the equipment to Russia, but the turbine has not yet been delivered.
For Berlin, this is a “political” decision and an “excuse” to put pressure on Western countries, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already warned that if Russia does not receive the missing turbines, the pipeline will run at 20% of its capacity from this week due to upcoming maintenance of a second turbine.
The Nord Stream gas pipeline connects Russia with Germany via the Baltic Sea and, according to Gazprom, has a capacity of 167 million cubic meters per day. Many countries are highly dependent on Russian energy resources.
Western countries accuse Moscow of using it in response to the sanctions that were adopted after the Russian attack on Ukraine.
For its part, the Kremlin says that sanctions are at the root of technical problems in the gas infrastructure and that Europe is affected by the measures it imposed on Russia.
In a previous statement issued today, Gazprom had indicated that the delivery of the first turbine had been halted, citing “problems” due to “EU and UK sanctions.”
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