BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec. 25
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
Pipeline gas imports from Algeria to the European Union (EU) countries fall to the lowest level in the third quarter of 2019 from 2014, Trend reports citing the European Commission’s gas market report.
“Pipeline gas imports from Algeria did not manage to break the dwindling trend and in Q3 2019, and were lower by 37 percent in year-on-year comparison, falling to the lowest since the beginning of the available time series (2014),” reads the report.
The European Commission said that the share of Algerian pipeline imports within the total extra-EU gas imports practically halved since the beginning of 2018 it was around 4 percent.
Although imports from Libya continued to grow in Q3 2019 compared to the same period of the previous year, its share was only 1.5 percent in the total EU gas imports. Imports from both Algeria and Libya showed a great volatility over the last few years, reflecting the issue of the competitiveness of import prices and supply availabilities in these two countries.
In the third quarter of 2019 the total net EU gas imports reached 86 bcm, slightly up from 85.6 bcm in the same period of 2018. The five biggest importers in the EU in Q3 2019 were Italy, Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands and respectively with net imports of 18 bcm, 17 bcm, 10 bcm, 10 bcm and 4 bcm, representing together around two thirds of the total EU net gas imports in this quarter.
In the first three quarters of 2019 the total net EU gas imports in the EU amounted to 291 bcm, which was 11 percent more than in the same period of 2018, amid increasing consumption (+2.9 percent) and decreasing domestic production (-7.4 percent), implying a further increase in gas import dependency in the EU.
Russia remained the top pipeline gas supplier of the EU, covering 45 percent of total extra-EU gas imports in the third quarter of 2019, which was close to the average share of Russia within the total pipeline imports over the last five years.
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