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Gas flows from Azerbaijan to Serbia have been halted and it is unclear when they will resume, news agency Tanjug quoted Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić as saying on 11 January.
“I got information from our Azerbaijan brothers and friends that because of force majeure, and problems they have, we as of today cannot count on 1.7 million cubic metres of gas that was coming every day,” Vučić told reporters.
Vučić said it was not clear when the gas flows would resume.
In 2023, Serbia, which uses more than 3 billion cubic metres of gas a year, signed a deal with Azerbaijan to purchase 400 million cubic metres of natural gas per year from 2024.
The rest of the gas comes from Russia.
Serbia, which aims to join the European Union, is under pressure to reduce its dependence on Russia for gas and oil.
Following new US sanctions on Russia’s oil sector, Russia’s Gazprom Neft will be given 45 days to exit ownership of Serbian oil company NIS, which is among the biggest contributors to Serbia’s budget.
NIS is majority owned by Gazprom Neft, which holds a 50% stake, and Russia’s Gazprom, which holds 6.15% of shares. The Serbian government holds 29.87%, with small shareholders accounting for the remainder.
Serbia receives gas via Bulgaria, where the Bulgarian state gas company Bulgargaz said they had been notified of the Azeri gas interruption.
Replacement gas volumes have been sourced from Turkey’s Botas, Bulgargaz said.
“Thus, the outage did not result in additional costs for the company to purchase replacement natural gas and did not affect the natural gas market in the region,” it said in Thursday’s statement, adding that the situation has made more case for diversification of sources of natural gas.
An industry source told Reuters that supplies were interrupted because of “an issue” at BP’s Alpha platform at the offshore Shah Deniz gas field in the Caspian Sea.
The Azeri media Trend asked British Petroleum, which operates Shah Deniz, to comment on the interruption.
BP said they had detected a technical issue in the subsea condensate export line between the Shah Deniz Alpha platform and the Sangachal terminal.
The Sangachal Terminal is an industrial complex consisting of a natural gas processing plant and oil production plant, located on the coast of the Caspian Sea 45 kilometres south of Baku.
“For operational reasons, production and export operations from the SDA platform were suspended and the platform has been safely shut down. All people on the platform are safe and there is no environmental impact. All offshore facilities including the SDA platform and the pipeline are also safe,” said BP.
ICGB AD, operator of the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria said that the pipeline is fully operational.
“We are not aware of the technical details that caused this as the issue does not lay with the interconnector’s facilities,” said the company.
Bulgaria stopped receiving Russian gas in April 2022 after it refused to pay for supply via a scheme involving rouble payments stipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But Bulgaria continues to transit Russian gas to Serbia and Hungary under contracts signed before Russia invaded Ukraine. The EU member, which needs about three billion cubic metres of gas per year, now receives more than 1 billion cubic metres from Azerbaijan while buying the rest elsewhere.
The EU and Azerbaijan in July 2022 signed an agreement to double gas imports of Azeri gas to Europe which seeks non-Russian suppliers after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
(Edited by Georgi Gotev)
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Energy News Beat