Five major German pipeline operators have merged their market areas on the 1 October 2009 and set up a joint company.
With the conclusion of contracts for market area cooperation and establishment of a joint company, the gas transport companies, Gasunie Deutschland, ONTRAS, WINGAS TRANSPORT and Statoil Deutschland Transport and DONG Energy Pipelines have laid the basis for merging their market areas from the 1st of October 2009. The new market area and the company that will be responsible for the balancing pool management will be called “GASPOOL”. The company is to be based in Berlin. The new cooperation is subject to approval by the responsible monopolies commission.
The new market area will create a transport and trading area for natural gas that will bring together more than 300 networks from import points to end customers virtually all over Germany.
A market area is a number of networks or sub-networks operated by various collaborating network operators in which transport customers can make flexible use of reserved capacity at entry and exit points. A market area begins at the entry points (import points, domestic sources, hubs, storage facilities or grid interconnection points between market areas) to a sub-network of wide area gas network operators and extends to the exit points serving end consumers within the market area that network hydraulics make it possible to reach.
NEWS:
GASPOOL and Aequamus set to merge
Integration of H- and L-gas area to create new cross-quality market area
GASPOOL and Aequamus are combining their market areas: A new crossquality market area, which is known as GASPOOL, has been created as of October 1, 2011. To this end, the companies Aequamus GmbH and GASPOOL Balancing Services GmbH were merged. The new GASPOOL market area is connecting around 400 gas networks and thus cover approximately half of the German gas market.