With the first strong rays of sunshine in the year, the gas storage facilities in Germany fill up again.

The storage facilities are intended to bridge the greater heating requirement in winter and must therefore be filled in the summer months.

At the same time, they represent a reserve in case the main supplier Russia no longer supplies - or an embargo prohibits it.

Ever since Russia turned off the gas supply to Poland and Bulgaria, the question of how secure the energy supply still is has become all the more important.

Jan Hauser

Editor in Business.

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If the gas storage tanks are full, a quarter of the annual consumption can be stored here.

While the storage tanks are 34 percent full on average in Germany, a large gas storage facility in Rehden in Lower Saxony remains at a filling level of 0.5 percent.

This is owned by the Russian energy company Gazprom and hardly helps security of supply.

Gazprom can no longer do as the state company likes.

Since April 4, the Federal Network Agency has taken over Gazprom Germania, Gazprom's German business, as trustee: These include the gas trader Wingas, a stake in the gas transport company Gascade and the gas storage operator Astora, which operates the storage facility in Rehden.

Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) justified the intervention with security of supply.

The trusteeship is based on the Foreign Trade Act, since Gazprom apparently wanted to sell the German business.

But even the network agency does not manage to fill up the memory so easily.

The authority itself states that it is working intensively on filling the storage facility in Rehden quickly: "The aim is to achieve the requirements of the Gas Storage Act." According to the Storage Act, which comes into force on May 1st, the gas storage facilities should be be 80 percent full on October 1, 90 percent on November 1, and 40 percent on February 1.

However, more would have to be done quickly in Rehden.

It can take a year and a half to fill it up completely.

The crux for the network agency, as with Habeck's storage specifications, is that the storage operators do not store gas themselves, but instead award the capacities to others who are generally not obliged to store it.

According to market rumours, a Russian Gazprom subsidiary, Gazprom Export, has secured the extensive storage rights for Gazprom's gas storage facility in Rehden.

This would be outside the trusteeship, which would limit the network agency's options.

Storage is going well at the Rehden gas storage facility

If Habeck's specifications for the filling levels in Rehden or elsewhere are not met, according to the Gas Storage Act, market area managers who handle gas network access in the area should fill the storage with a special tender or buy gas themselves.

However, the merger of the gas storage operator INES sees financial, legal and operational risks in the conversion from a decentralized, market-based gas storage market to centrally organized and politically controlled structures.

Attempts by individual operators to rent storage space for gas through tendering procedures have been unsuccessful.

"We are concerned that unbooked storage capacities will no longer be booked due to the fill level specifications and existing bookings will be cancelled," says INES Managing Director Sebastian Bleschke.

Despite the dent in Rehden, the storage is going well.

On April 1, the fill level was 27 percent, as in the previous year, but has since risen to almost 34 percent, according to the AGSI platform.

Currently, the utilization rate of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals in the EU is more than 75 percent and higher than a year ago, as Bleschke notes.

He sees an incentive for storage in the fact that the current gas price is lower than the winter trading price.

Timm Kehler, head of the industry association Zukunft Gas, speaks of good filling according to market mechanisms in the past few weeks.

But the Russian delivery stop to Poland and Bulgaria resulted in sharp price jumps.

"It is therefore not possible to say at this point in time whether the fill levels prescribed by the Storage Act can be reached without government intervention," he says.

This means that the further filling process up to winter remains exciting enough.