The Gas Situation & No Work On Saturday

You may have read in the news about Russia and Ukraine's disagreement about natural gas. Essentially, Ukraine has been vastly underpaying Russia for gas. The fact that Ukraine potentially supplied weapons to Georgia during the war in the summer does not help matters. Russia has shut off gas to the Ukraine before, but this year is different because:

• Vladimir Putin ordered Gazprom to lower the amount of gas Russia was sending to Europe via Ukraine (by the same amount that Ukraine was stealing from Russia).
• A Ukranian court annulled a Russia-Ukraine gas transit agreement.

Europe gets a lot of its gas from Russia, and this spat is already having a vast impact. (Over 10,000 people in Bulgaria don't have heat. It's 20 degrees F there!) Hungary gets nearly 45% of its energy from natural gas (this is A LOT), so here's how we've been affected:

1. I was supposed to go to work on Saturday. In Hungary, when a public holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, the government gives you the Monday or Friday off, but everyone has to make it up on a specific Saturday. Because we got Friday, January 2 off, the entire country was supposed to go to work this Saturday, January 10. (Nothing like a 6-day work week to start the new year, right?) However, in order to save gas, this work day has been moved to Saturday, March 28 to make up for a holiday we're having around that time. Woo hoo!
2. Big Hungarian industrial companies have switched their power source from gas to oil, sent afternoon staff home early, lowered temperatures (this happened at the big mall right next to me, where I bought the salsa a few days ago) - see article
3. Car factories and others have temporarily shut down due to gas restrictions and weak demand

The big deal looking forward is that there are a lot of gas pipelines in the works in Europe. Given the current situation, the Nabucco pipeline is fairly exciting, as it will bring Middle Eastern gas into SE Europe, via Turkey. Two other pipelines will bring in more Russian gas, but will bypass Ukraine - North Stream in the North (via the Baltic Sea to Germany) and South Stream (guess where?) in the South (which will just divert gas that previously went through Ukraine). These pipelines will be years in the making (and in the approving - there's a lot of disagreement about North Stream's environmental impact in the Baltic). But, there's a lot going on that may help avert similar situations in the future.

I did some work for energy companies in the fall, and it was quite topical even then. I'm currently starting a major banking project and am struck that a lot of the work I've been doing has put me right in the thick of several major goings-on.