According to Reuters, interest in joint gas purchases promoted by Poland since 2014 has exceeded the expectations. The European Commission wants this mechanism to remain in place forever.
The European Union introduced the AggregateEU mechanism in response to the energy crisis fueled by Gazprom. This is a joint declaration of demand by Member States, which will then be represented in the negotiations by the Commission in order to obtain a better offer from the market. Poland has been proposing this solution since 2014, when it became part of the Energy Union program.
AggregateEU will be in force until December 2023 and has provided about a third of the gas in European storage facilities that have been filled at a record pace to more than 90 percent set in the plan at the end of October. This happened in mid-August. Joint purchases provided more than 27 billion cubic meters of gas, and the Commission expected they would bring in 13.5 bcm.
Poland also had national provisions on mandatory gas reserves, which were a model for the EU’s obligation to collect up to 90 percent of them before the end of each October.
Reuters has seen the Commission’s proposal for a permanent possibility to participate in joint gas purchases. Such purchases would be mandatory in the event of another supply crisis, as in 2022, in order to avoid competition between EU countries. The proposal is to be discussed in October.
The REPowerEU Program assumes that the European Union will abandon gas supplies from Russia by 2027 at the latest. Joint purchases of gas exclude the Russian direction.
Reuters / Wojciech Jakóbik