Nicolae Ciuca: There is no fear Romania may not have gas needed for 2022-2023 winter

Premier Ciuca announced on Thursday, in the context of the EC decision on gas consumption, which will be reduced by 15% throughout the community bloc as of August 1, 2022 until March 31, 2023, and there is no fear that Romania may not have the gas needed for the 2022-2023 winter. The premier also announced that 1.6 billion cubic meters had been stored until yesterday.   “The measure is a precaution and with it we need to maintain solidarity at EU level and Romania was part of the decisions which consolidated solidarity within EU,” the premier added.   “I can say now that yesterday we exceeded 1.6 billion cubic meters in storage, and the evolution of daily storage is consisting and encouraging,” the premier showed, saying that “as of November 1 we will reach 80% of capacity.”   “We should have reached 46% until August 1, 57% by September 1. 66% until October 1 and 80% by November 1. Today we have exceeded the assumed percentages and at the end of last week we had 200 million cubic meters over what we had in the same period of 2021. At present there is no fear that Romania may not have gas needed for 2022-2023 winter,” the head of the executive showed.   According to the premier, this decision on reducing gas consumption will be made according to “gas quantities existing in storage before the beginning of winter” and added that from data he had read that morning, Germany had announced that gas supply had resumed.   “For now, our preoccupation is to to ensure the necessary gas and coal resources to have energy in winter. Lignite exploitation should extract and store more coal, to prevent last year's situation when we had stored a quantity which could ensure the functioning of coal plants for no more than 3 to 5 days. All these data depend on weather conditions,” Ciuca said.