On Monday, the Danish energy company Ørsted and the Dutch gas trading company GasTerra warned that Russia could turn off the taps as soon as Tuesday because they had refused to make payments in rubles, a few weeks after Moscow did the same in Poland, Bulgaria and Finland.
Ørsted said he had no legal obligation to pay in rubles in his contract with Russian state energy giant Gazprom and that the payment deadline is Tuesday, May 31st. He would continue to pay in euros, he said in a statement.
“There is a risk that Gazprom Export will stop supplying gas to Ørsted … this will be a breach of contract,” Ørsted said in a statement.
The company said it had prepared for an abrupt rupture of its Russian gas imports and had been filling storage facilities in Denmark and Germany.
GasTerra said Gazprom would “interrupt” its gas deliveries from Tuesday. That means about 2 billion cubic meters of contracted gas will not be delivered by early October.
GasTerra said it had prepared for the scenario by buying gas from other sources.
About 4% of total energy consumption in Denmark, and about 2% in the Netherlands, comes from Russian gas, according to Bruegel, an economic think tank.
In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to cut gas deliveries to “unfriendly” countries that refused to pay in rubles, instead of the euros or dollars indicated in the contracts.
Since then, Gazprom has been offering customers a solution. Buyers could make payments in euros or dollars to an account in Russia’s Gazprombank, which would then convert the funds into rubles and transfer them to a second account from which payment would be made in Russia.
GasTerra said in a statement that it would not comply with Gazprom’s “unilateral payment requirements”.
Some of the largest energy companies in Europe have begun the process of opening new accounts. But the European Commission has warned that by doing so, energy companies would breach sanctions that, among other things, prohibit buyers from opening a ruble account. Germany, the bloc’s largest economy, is heavily dependent on Russian gas to power its homes and industries, although it has managed to reduce Russia’s share of its imports to 35% from 55% before beginning of the war. The bloc has set itself the goal of reducing its Russian gas consumption by 66% by the end of the year and completely breaking its dependence by 2027.
– Robert North contributed to the report.