Abstract
Ever since the 2009 natural gas crisis, energy security has been a crucial priority for countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Escalating in 2014, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia further fuelled negative expectations about the future development of energy relations for the region predominantly supplied by Russia. As a response to the planned cessation of gas transit through the Brotherhood pipeline, which brings Russian gas to Europe via Ukraine and Slovakia, the Slovak transmission system operator Eustream proposed the Eastring pipeline. This Perspective analyses this proposal and argues that neither the perceived decrease in Slovak energy security nor the loss of economic rent from the international gas transit should be the main policy driver behind such a major infrastructure project. Although marketed as an answer to current Central and Eastern European gas supply security challenges, the Eastring pipeline is actually mainly focused on issues connected to the Slovak gas transit.
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Change history
06 November 2017
In the version of this Perspective originally published, the accepted date was incorrectly given as 15 October 2017; it should have read 15 September 2017. This has now been corrected in all versions of the Perspective.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency, grant no. APVV-16-0062, and the Faculty of Arts (Comenius University in Bratislava), grant no. FG13/2017.
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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-017-0050-7.
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Mišík, M., Nosko, A. The Eastring gas pipeline in the context of the Central and Eastern European gas supply challenge. Nat Energy 2, 844–848 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-017-0019-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-017-0019-6
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