Serbia has the largest gas reserves in its history, says Vučić

BELGRADE, 8 Oct – PRIME. Serbia has stocked up on its territory and in Hungary the largest gas reserves in its history, said President Aleksandar Vučić.

“We now have the largest gas reserves in the history of the Republic of Serbia thanks to purchases. Our underground gas storage (UGS) Banatski Dvor is filled to the top, we are currently not using gas reserves, regardless of what the thermal power plants in Novi Sad and Zrenjanin have turned on “, Vučić said on Saturday in an address to citizens.

He clarified that at the moment the price of gas under a two-year agreement with the Russian Federation is 330 euros per thousand cubic meters, the contract with Gazprom provides up to 65% of Serbia’s annual needs.

“We currently have 380 million tons in Hungary, 286 million tons in our part of the Banatski Dvor UGS facility, there are also about 240 million tons in the Russian part, but this is Russian, not ours. Why do we no longer have UGS facilities in Serbia, because we have not been able to reach an agreement with our Russian partners, we have been asking a hundred times already to build an underground storage facility in Itebey ourselves, and it does not work,” the Serbian leader said.

At the end of March, Vučić reported that the Serbian authorities, together with their Russian partners, should quickly expand existing and build new oil and gas storage facilities against the backdrop of the sanctions crisis.

The Serbian leader announced in December 2021 that he planned, together with Russia, to expand the Banatski Dvor underground gas storage (UGS) from about 500 million to 1 billion cubic meters and build a new gas storage nearby at the site of the current Itebey gas metering station in a village near Banatski Dvora in the autonomous province of Vojvodina towards the Romanian border.