July 02, 2024
Jul 2024 - Larelli

According to ENTSOG data, Hungary no longer imports Russian gas either directly from Ukraine or from Austria, but they import it via Serbia, thanks to Turkstream. The flows of the first route had collapsed with the start of Turkstream in 2020 and have been basically halted since early 2022. The ones from Austria have been completely halted since September 2023.

The annual natural gas consumption in Hungary was 8,5 billion cubic meters in 2023, so on average 23,3 million cubic meters per day. From Serbia they are importing 22,5 million cubic meters per day and from Croatia (which has a large LNG terminal) 1/2 million cubic meters per day. In recent months they have also imported several million cubic meters per day from Romania - a similar amount is then re-exported to Slovakia, though. It’s doable for them, while being far from an ideal situation: if Turkstream had unforeseen outages they would run into serious problems. The biggest issues will be for Austria though, which will have to turn to Germany and Italy.

Then there is the matter of the Druzhba 2 pipeline, which continues to send Russian oil to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic via Ukraine. Although at least the latter two countries have serious plans to, respectively, reduce and eliminate Russian imports, as far as I know.