19 Feb. () –
The Minister of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, Jozef Sikela, announced this Sunday that the country has managed to reduce its imports of Russian gas to zero in the last year.
“Last year, the opposition threatened that we could not survive the winter without Russian gas. We promised the opposite and did everything possible for it,” said the Czech minister, who announced that imports have been reduced to zero during the month of January.
As explained by the person in charge through Twitter, since the end of supplies from the Nord Stream gas pipeline, Russian gas has only been able to reach the Czech Republic through Slovakia, and as he stated: “Only 2.2 percent of the total imports flowed from there from September of last year to the end of January.”
In this month, the amount acquired in this way has not been “not even a cubic meter” so the country has been able to get by with the supply of gas through Germany.
Secondly, Russian gas deliveries through Germany have been replaced by gas from Norway and also by liquefied natural gas from Belgium and the Netherlands, Sikela pointed out.
“We achieved it mainly thanks to energy savings”, clarified the minister who also stated that, only in the aforementioned period, the country has reduced its energy consumption “by almost 28 percent compared to the previous year”, due to which would have saved more than 850 million cubic meters of gas.
Sikela has given thanks for “responsible gas consumption” but has not specified whether the country becomes definitively independent of Russian gas for the future.
The former Minister of Industry and Commerce and vice president of the opposition movement ANO, Karel Havlícek, has praised Sikela’s data but has pointed out that the decision on which gas flows into the country is not decided in the Czech Republic but in Germany: “The vast majority of the supplied gas comes to us from German pipelines, and we only buy a mixture of gas from various sources that lead to German territory,” he told the CTK agency.
According to Havlícek, after the closure of Nord Stream, the gas mixture came mainly from Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands, so the gas that Germany receives will always also be received by the Czech Republic regardless of the contracts signed with national entities.
