Virgil Popescu talks about a series of extremely important decisions for natural gas prices in Romanians' bills all over the country, and this is because the authorities in Romania have been working for the last 2 years to find alternatives to gas from Russia, and they were created by the end of 2021.
Virgil Popescu says that now Romania has 2 other alternatives to gas from Russia, and this can lead to a decrease in natural gas prices during the next year, even without using the gas that the Russian Federation uses to control the response the world to the war he is waging in Ukraine.
"Romania was dependent on 10%, 20%, and 25% of Russian gas. If we do not put natural gas reserves in place, obviously the dependence on Russian gas or imports will increase. At the moment, Romania is somewhere between 25% and 28% of gas imports, and obviously until now most of the imports come from Russia.
Until the end of last year, Romania had no possibility to bring gas from anywhere other than the Russian Federation. The transit pipelines T1, T2, T3 were under contract with Gazprom until 2020. In practice, that inter-Balkan contract that brought Russian gas through Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey was owned by Gazprom.
In 2020, together with those from Transgaz, we succeeded, invoking the new European gas directive, to take and stop this contact by mutual agreement with Gazprom, and the T1, T2, T3 pipelines returned to the national transport system, Transgaz carrying out works of reverse flow both at the border with Ukraine and at the border with Bulgaria.
At the moment we have an inter-Balkan corridor on which Romania can bring gas from Turkey - Bulgaria - Romania. Here we are talking about Turkish ports, and we can also talk about gas from Azerbaijan. Moreover, there is that interconnector between Greece and Bulgaria that was supposed to be ready a long time ago, but for which we have promises from both the Greek and Bulgarian prime ministers, that it will be ready in 2022.
With the completion of the Greece-Bulgaria interconnector, the vertical corridor that brings gas from the Tanap pipelines to Russia will be operational, and Romania will have two alternative routes to bring gas from outside Russia. LNG from Turkish ports, and the inter-Balkan pipeline and the vertical corridor."
