Vulnerability assessment of the European natural gas supply

As indigenous natural gas reserves within the European Union (EU) decline, higher gas imports are expected in order to meet future EU gas demand. Natural gas will be transported across considerable distances from regions of gas reserves to European consumers. This raises security of gas supply concerns especially for EU countries that depend heavily on a single supply source or major transit route. A linear programming model of the European gas supplies was developed and used to investigate the impact of loss of the Ukraine transit capacity on gas supply from Russia to Europe. Two demand scenarios - that is a reference case and a high demand case in the winter of 2014/2015 were investigated. The results have shown that gas flows on interconnectors and from storage and liquefied natural gas import terminals compensated for the supply shortfall. Furthermore, to mitigate the effect of the supply shortage, the impact of increasing the capacities of selected pipelines within the EU was compared against increasing the maximum storage withdrawal rates in southeast Europe. Higher storage withdrawal rates achieved lower demand curtailment than the additional interconnector capacity in both scenarios.