Publications
Half empty or half full?Developments on the Hungarian natural gas storage marketPublished: 1 of December, 2012

A noticeable tendency from the last few years has been the lower and lower capacity utilisation of the Hungarian natural gas storage facilities at the beginning of the withdrawal period. Even though the volume of gas withdrawn from the storage sites to satisfy the demand of winter months has essentially not changed (around 34-37%), the utilisation rate of the capacity of domestic facilities fell from almost 100% in early October 2009 to 50% by October 2012. In absolute terms, nevertheless, there was 3 bcm of natural gas in non-strategic storage facilities, the same order of magnitude as the 2009 inventory. In our article we seek to explore the processes that are behind the severe decline of the utilisation of storage space