Bulgaria gas industry on tenterhooks
Ihtiman:thehaltofrussiangassuppliestobulgaria last week has let companies big and small scrambling as they fear cuts to deliveries and rising prices.
“We are already on the brink. We’ll have to raise our prices further,” said Valery Krastev, who owns a bread factory in the northern town of Montana. “How will people pay for this bread?” he worried. The government has insisted Bulgaria has “alternative choices” to Russian gas and won’t reduce suppliestoconsumers,callingmoscow’smovetohalt deliveries “blackmail”.
While natural gas supplies had escaped punishing European sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow sought to sow division among Europeannationsbyexploitingtheirdependenceon its gas. Russia demanded that Gazprom customers have to pay in rubles rather than US dollars or euros, which would be a violation of Western sanctions.
Therussianenergygiantcutdeliveriestobulgaria and Poland on April 27.
Since then, Bulgaria’s neighbours have stepped in, shoring up deliveries to the country, which has received more than 90 percent of its gas from Russia for decades.
But the lack of a long-term solution to secure the Balkan EU member’s annual needs of about 3.0 billion cubic metres of gas is keeping large industrial consumers as well as smaller businesses on tenterhooks. Many people living in Sofia still remember January 2009 when a Russia-ukraine gas spat cut deliveries to Europe for days on end, leaving their homes without heating in the dead of winter and prompting rationing for industry.
So far supplies to Sofia’s municipal utility Toplofikacia are uninterrupted, according to its head Alexander Alexandrov.
The utility gets close to 40 percent of all gas in the country to supply 1.5 million people, or a fourth of Bulgaria’s population, with heat and hot water.
“We cannot keep operating for more than 24 hours in the event of a complete cut in gas supply,” Alexandrov told AFP in an interview, adding that switching back to using fuel oil if gas were cut would have a “grave environmental impact”.