Status and operation mode of underground gas storage in Europe

Underground gas storage is the important means for natural gas peak shaving and the guarantee for national energy supply safety. At present, the UGS industry in China is at the early stage of development. A large number of UGSs are constructed and put into production in China, but the UGS operation system has not been built and the management process and principles need improving, so peak shaving and supply capacities are insufficient. To solve these problems, the UGS status, operation systems and process and management regulations and principles in Europe were summarized systematically. Based on the European UGS management experience, the following conclusions were reached. Firstly, the working gas in the EU in 2016 is 13 times more than that in 2010. With the increasing of peak shaving demand and construction scale of UGSs in China, it is in urgent need to build up Chinese UGS operation and management mode by referring the operation management methods in EU. Secondly, it is necessary to develop a variety of gas storage capacity products, carry out extensive gas storage services from the rapidly fluctuating storage to the seasonal storage and optimize the gas storage capacity portfolio of customers to achieve the purpose of flexible utilization of gas storage capacity. Thirdly, the buyback, unsubscription and secondary market mechanisms of European UGSs are beneficial to the balance of gas storage capacity among the customers. A nationally unified standardized operation process should be gradually formed by formulating detailed provisions such as the assignment limits, storage capacity usage, capacity overrun, disruption and restriction on customers' capacity, and redistribution injection and withdrawal. And fourthly, Chinese UGS operators should build up a UGS storage capacity trading platform. With the increasing of UGS scale, a single-pipeline multi-UGS combined transport platform should be established. And gradually, a national operating system with multiple pipelines and UGSs will be formed for combined distribution and transportation. Thus, the pipeline network system can be optimized and the large-system optimal peak shaving of pipelines and underground gas storages will be realized.