8. Supply disruption

No major supply disruption has occurred in the past. This positive experience shows that the gas industry has in the past been able to maintain continuous gas supplies without significant disruptions for the end consumers, even under extraordinary circumstances. The gas industries have well developed instruments available enabling them to handle disruptions in supplies and disturbances in their own infrastructure.

These instruments include diversified supply sources, import contracts with flexible load factors, underground storage facilities, back-up supply agreements between gas companies and industrial customers under interruptible supply contracts, and an efficient European pipeline network including cooperation between the gas companies involved. Structural changes in the market do not automatically result in a lowering of security of supply standards as long as there is clarity about roles and responsibilities and market participants can demonstrate that they are able to fulfil their obligations. Any definition of supply standards should be market based, and not based on measures to be implemented by the gas industry.

Import dependency as such does not threaten supply security as long as the political and regulatory framework supports the required investments and acknowledges the long-term orientation of the gas business.

If an even higher level of supply security is required than was the case in the past, resulting measures should be tailored to meet actual needs, including specific risk management. It should be clear that any additional measures, like additional storage and interconnections or investments for – in many cases unnecessary – gas quality standardizations, could be very costly and would in the end have to be paid for by the consumer ¹² .

12 Given regional differences in the structure of the gas markets and structural differences in supply options for these markets, it is not possible to quantify the cost of additional supply security. However, if such a higher security of supply level were artificially imposed, it would neither be economical nor acceptable from a consumer’s point of view.