Market Consultation of the Open Season 2017 Rules for the Baltic Pipe Project

The project promoters of the Baltic Pipe Project, the Polish and the Danish gas transmission system operators, Gas Transmission Operator GAZ-SYSTEM SA and Energinet.dk are launching the market consultation of the Open Season 2017 Rules.

The Open Season process is designed to enable shippers to provide relevant TSOs with positive investments signals that are required for realization of the Baltic Pipe Project and ensure transparency and equal treatment of all Participants. The entire process will run from December 2016, starting with a market consultation of the Rules and will end in the second half of 2017, by signing the capacity agreements which will be subject to conditions precedent.

Therefore, GAZ-SYSTEM SA and Energinet.dk invite all interested market participants to participate in the market consultation of the Open Season Rules 2017. The consultation will run from 6 December 2016 to 6 January 2017 16:00 (CET).

During the consultation process, Energinet.dk and GAZ-SYSTEM SA will collect questions raised by market participants toward the Open Season Rules 2017 and answers to these questions, in a general and anonymous form through the Q&A section on the website.

After the consultation, GAZ-SYSTEM SA and Energinet.dk will evaluate the responses received during the consultation, and, if necessary adjust the Open Season 2017 Rules. Moreover, GAZ-SYSTEM SA and Energinet.dk will inform the Polish and Danish NRAs about the result of the market consultation, the outcome thereof and obtain their approval of the final version of the Open Season 2017 Rules (as the case may be).

The Open Season 2017 documents are available at the following websites:

GAZ-SYSTEM S.A: Open Season Baltic Pipe

Energinet.dk: Open Season

In 2016 GAZ-SYSTEM SA and Energinet.dk have investigated the possibility of establishing an interconnection between the two national markets through a bidirectional offshore pipeline and expansion of the national transmission systems to ensure full functionality of the new pipeline, in order to secure gas transportation from Norway to Poland. The possibility has been investigated in a feasibility study. The works on the feasibility study of the Baltic Pipe Project are at the final stage and they will be concluded by the end of 2016 before launching the Open Season procedure.

As a part of this feasibility study, a market test was conducted to assess general interest of third parties to the Baltic Pipe Project. The result of the market test was positive, in terms of indicating a non-binding market demand for the project. Consequently, the next step is to invite existing and prospective shippers to participate in an open season in order to collect the market’s long-term investment signal.

The main objectives of the Baltic Pipe Project are to further strengthen supply diversification, market integration, price convergence and security of supply in primarily Poland and Denmark and secondarily in Sweden, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Baltic region:

• integrating the Danish, Swedish and Polish gas markets by means of supply competition and bidirectional trading secondly with a view to include planned interconnections to the Central and Eastern Europe (via Poland-Czech Republic interconnection, Poland-Slovakia interconnection, Poland-Ukraine interconnection) and the Baltic States (via Poland-Lithuania interconnection);
• strengthening regional security of supply through supply diversification (enabling new sources of gas supply);
• increasing the competitiveness on the regional gas markets and facilitating price convergence between the markets, possibility of new players entrance and potential increase in gas demand in the impacted regions;
• improvement in technical reliability of gas supply for customers by diversifying the imported gas supply directions
• connecting the Baltic Pipe to the LNG terminal in Świnoujście, which could in the future guarantee Scandinavian countries access to the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market.

rel (GAZ-SYSTEM)