Austria and Slovenia keep their one-way gas link until 2029
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readThe EU's Security of Gas Supply Regulation says that gas must be able to flow in both directions at every cross-border interconnection point between member states. The Murfeld/Ceršak point between Austria and Slovenia has been exempt from that requirement, and on 14 September ACER issued a favourable Opinion on extending the exemption until November 2029. The announcement is at https://www.acer.europa.eu/news/acer-supports-exemption-bi-directional-gas-flow-between-austria-and-slovenia.
The route was: the two transmission system operators proposed the extension, the national regulators approved it in coordinated decisions, and ACER reviewed those decisions. Its findings are that the process was run in time and in coordination, that the decisions comply with the Regulation, that current market signals do not indicate a need for capacity from Slovenia to Austria, and that building it anyway would be an inefficient investment — costs significantly outweighing the benefit to Austrian security of supply. The four-year extension is judged justified provided market conditions and infrastructure do not change significantly in the meantime.
What it means
The bi-directional rule is a security provision, and this is what it costs to apply it literally. It was written after supply interruptions made one-way pipes look like a strategic liability, and it applies to every border regardless of whether anyone would ever ship gas that way. The exemption mechanism exists precisely because a rule that strict produces steel nobody uses; the interesting thing is that the escape hatch requires a regulator to state, on the record, that the security case does not justify the spend.
"No market signal" is a claim about today, and the conditional is doing the work. The extension holds only while conditions do not change significantly — which in gas has lately meant a change measured in weeks. Four years is a long exemption to hang on a present-tense observation, and the Opinion is careful to say so.
And this is the quiet half of the energy transition. Most attention goes to what gets built. A large share of the actual decisions now being taken across Europe are about what will not be built in a system whose gas demand is expected to fall — and each of them is a small, documented bet on the shape of the 2030s.