Germany not affected by Belarus gas transit halt :: Charter'97 :: News

The suspension of gas supplies to Western Europe via Belarus has not affected consumers in Germany or other countries, a staffer in the Moscow office of the German gas company Wintershall told Interfax on Thursday. He believes that his company will keep Western European consumers reliably supplied by diversifying supply routes and using reserves in underground storage.

The suspension of gas supplies through Belarus came as no surprise to Wintershall, he said. Company officials maintain permanent contacts with Gazprom to tackle technical issues in supplying gas to Germany, he said.

Wintershall is Gazprom`s strategic partner on the German market and runs two joint ventures with the company engaged in gas sales and pipeline development.

On February 18, Gazprom ended all supplies of Russian gas to Belarus and gas transit across Belarus in response to unauthorized siphoning of gas from export pipelines.

Gazprom said that it held Belarus responsible for all failures on the Russian concern`s part to meet its commitments to foreign consumers and undertook to partially offset possible losses to customers by stepping up supplies through other pipelines.

Russian gas flowing across Belarus and Poland is fed to a monitoring station near Frankfort-on-Oder and later to a distribution station outside Berlin. It can also reach Germany via the Czech Republic and Austria through any of four stations.

Gazprom will not be able to keep gas supplies at their regular level without using the Belarus route for more than three days, an official of a Western European gas company told Interfax on condition of anonymity.

Western purchasers of Russian gas deal directly with Gazprom, rather than with Beltransgaz, the Belarussian gas transport company, the official said. They will demand that Gazprom, rather than Belarus, pay damages, he said. However, he added that Gazprom is unlikely to end all gas transit across Belarus in the next day or two.