Two Norwegian gas entry points to merge in October

Shippers will only be able to book transport capacity for Norwegian gas entering Germany and the Netherlands at two points from the beginning of October, rather than the three currently available, Dutch transmission system operator (TSO) Gasunie announced on Wednesday.

Norwegian operator Gassco plans to merge the two Emden entry points, known as Emden EMS and Emden NGT on the Norwegian side and Emden NPT and Emden EPT1 on the German side. As a result, all capacity will have to be booked at Emden EPT1 from 1 October 2015.

None of the capacity formerly available at Emden NPT will be lost, and Gasunie said that previously marketed capacity for Emden NPT would be migrated. The third point for Norwegian gas entering the Dutch and German systems, Dornum, is also unaffected by the changes.

At 12:00 London time on Wednesday, gas was flowing through the Dornum entry point at a rate of around 55 million cubic metres (mcm)/day, through Emden EMS at a rate of around 51mcm/day and through Emden NGT at a rate of around 28mcm/day.

In the last annual capacity auctions at the Emden points on 2 March 2015, Gasunie’s German subsidiary Gasunie Deutschland sold 210MWh of the 7.5GWh of capacity available for Gas Year 2015 and 1.2GWh of the 4.8GWh available for Gas Year 2019, while the Dutch TSO sold just 5kWh for each gas year from 2015 to 2020, from up to 23.3GWh available. However, more capacity was sold when auctioned in shorter-term products.

German TSOs jordgas Transport, Open Grid Europe and Thyssengas also sell entry capacity at the two Emden points. julie.fisher@icis.com