The winter that has just passed will be remembered by those involved in energy, but not only, how the year of the exceptional wave of frost and a new gas emergency. From the end of January to the second week of February, the whole of Europe was scourged by the Siberian cold and forced to face a temporary interruption of the regularity of international methane flows with important reductions in Russian supplies - covering about 1/4 of European needs and 1/3 of the Italian ones. On the demand side, at the same time, daily consumption soared across the continent, in the particular case of Italy, on 7 February the historic record of 465,9 million cubic meters consumed in a single day was reached, a value equal to the annual consumption assumed for the whole of Sardinia - not yet methanized - in the hypothesis of construction of the Galsi submarine gas pipeline.
Faced with this situation of tension between supply and demand, it is inevitable that the debate has rekindled – not only among insiders – on the need for new methane supply infrastructures, which can thus diversify imports into Italy, and, for the truth to a much lesser extent, of new investments in gas storage capacity.
On closer inspection, in the case of the recent emergency, the problem of diversification of supplies is only a collateral issue to that of the maximum injection capacity into the storage network. Certainly, being able to count on a more varied and flexible supply system, and therefore on a greater number of entry points, would have put Italy in a less critical situation in the face of the reduction in flows from Russia. At the same time, however, since it is mainly a market problem "pulled" to the peak of demand, the investment that par excellence would have been able to mitigate these critical issues is that in new storage sites and network injection capacity from them.
Nonetheless, there has been much talk of new regasification terminals, which, as is known, offer the advantage of not having a physical link – but at the most contractual – with the producing country, and instead allow the arrival of methane tankers loaded with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from different producing countries. Ironically, precisely in the days of the emergency, the two regasification terminals already operational in Italy (at Panigaglia and Porto Viro) proved to be ineffective, since the exceptional cold wave also led to bad sea conditions, thus hindering operations of LNG discharge. Even more ironic, and even more worrying, is the announcement by British Gas, after more than a decade spent on authorizations and permits, that it wants to abandon, or rather freeze, the project for a regasification terminal in Brindisi.
The concern about the abandonment of these investments is not based so much on the possible tension between demand and supply of methane in Italy on an annual basis. The consumption peaks of 2005 at 85,3 billion cubic meters have never been reached again and in 2011 demand stood at 76,7 billion cubic meters.
The macroeconomic forecasts for the next few years do not lead us to believe that a significant recovery in industrial consumption is possible, while for the thermoelectric sector the competition from renewable sources and imports, in addition to the very narrow gross margins, has reduced the generation of gas-fired plants. It is therefore unlikely that demand in the medium term will reach levels such as to question the adequacy of the already existing annual supply capacity, which is why the decision to divest the two foreign companies appears rational also on the basis of the new market conditions.
On the other hand, it is worrying that Italian bureaucracy, slow authorization procedures and local opposition have in fact prevented investors from building such infrastructures when the market was in such conditions as to guarantee the profitability of such projects. Since the energy sector is characterized by a marked cyclical nature of investments, failing to expand one's infrastructures during periods of a "short" market translates into greater difficulty the next time the market becomes "tight" again.
On the side of investments in storage sites, however, the greatest progress should come from Legislative Decree 130/2010. The decree introduced new mechanisms to favor the increase in storage capacity for a maximum of 8 billion cubic meters additional to the current approximately 10 billion. Investors such as thermoelectric companies, SMEs and their aggregations are also participating in the financing of the new ones, encouraged by the possibility of benefiting for the next 5 years from the same economic advantages that they would have drawn from the share of storage capacity due to them if the infrastructure had been built immediately. However, for now, we are still in the realm of the virtual, as the mechanism has been renamed.
All that remains is therefore to wait for the construction of the infrastructures, hoping that they will encounter fewer obstacles than the projects for the regasification terminals.
