6. NATURAL GAS

The only functioning natural gas underground storage facility in the Baltic states,

Inčukalns has a total technical capacity of 4.47 bcm, of which 2.32 bcm was active in 2018. According to the owner of the Inčukalns underground gas storage facility,

JSC Conexus Baltic Grid, it is possible to increase the active capacity to 3.2 bcm to ensure the Baltic region’s needs for natural gas, or to expand it even further to store natural gas volumes required by Finland in a future regional market. The company made an investment request with the Latvian authorities in 2018 to enhance the operations of the storage facility to allow the Inčukalns to maintain its functionality in a regional transmission system following the Balticonnector project completion. The upgrade would install compressors to raise the storage pressure and allow, for the first time, compressor extraction, raising the gas extraction capacity from 30 mcm/d to 32 mcm/d (Conexus, 2018).

Infrastructure developments

Biomethane infrastructure

In 2018, two biomethane stations were started operations in Estonia, with a total capacity of 6.5 mcm/y. The plant in Kunda is capable of injecting a total volume of up to 48 gigawatt hours per year (GWh/y, or 5 mcm/y) of produced biomethane into the local distribution grid. The plant in Paide is an off-grid unit that delivers biomethane to an offgrid system. The Estonian government has indicated that at least three more biomethane production units are expected to start operating in the coming years (IEA, 2018).

The Estonian government is committed to injecting the locally produced biomethane into the natural gas network and targets to have 3-4% of the total gas in the network from biomethane by 2020, the equivalent of around 12-15 mcm/y.

The Estonian government is also committed to supporting the development of fueling stations for biomethane and CNG, with the goal of having 30 stations nationwide by 2020. In April 2018, Eesti Gaas opened Estonia’s first gas station to sell green gas, supplied from the country’s first biomethane production in Kunda. The gas station is in the centre of Tallinn. Eesti Gaas plans to expand biomethane sales across its network of stations selling CNG, which in 2018 consisted of eight stations – four in Tallinn, two in Pärnu, one in Tartu and one in Narva – and plans to open additional stations in Viljandi, Rakvere and Jõhvi (Eesti Gaas, 2018).

Regional network interconnections

Projects underway to develop and improve regional interconnections will transform the Estonian gas network into an important part of a transit corridor. The most important of these is the Balticconnector project, including enhancements to the Karksi (EstoniaLatvia) interconnection, which will connect the gas systems of Finland and the Baltic states. Another important project in the region is the construction of the Gas Interconnection Poland-Lithuania (GIPL), which will connect the gas systems of the Baltic states with Central Europe. The three Baltic countries agreed to develop a common tariff methodology for transmission services in 2019 for their common input-output zone. The zone will be expanded to include Finland starting in 2020, following the completion of the Balticconnector (Figure 6.5).

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ENERGY SECURITY