Good news: gas consumer prices to fall in Hungary

The world gas price has not been as low as it is now for three months. Hungary will also feel the price drop, but we will have to wait a little longer. For the time being, we are using the gas Hungary bought earlier, at a higher price.

Despite what the Hungarian government calls “sanction inflation” and the collusion of energy companies, as rtl.hu writes, the price of natural gas has not been so low in a while. As a result, the direction of gas procurement in Hungary has started to shift quite spectacularly in the last week or two, G7 reports. The route through which Russian gas arrives is slowly decreasing, and more gas is coming in from the north and west. While gas volumes from Serbia have decreased, imports from Austria have increased, and after a four-month break, deliveries from Slovakia have resumed.

With prices falling, this is a perfectly logical market process, but it also shows that the government’s argument about physical dependence on Russia is simply not true. Monday was the seventh consecutive day in which more than 40 million cubic metres of natural gas entered the country. This was not only unprecedented since the outbreak of the war, but also before.

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It has now become clear that the measures taken to replace Russian gas have proved to be a good idea across Europe, and other gas producers are absolutely willing to take over the supply from Russia. The question is where the price drop will stop, what to expect this winter, and whether our wallets will feel the impact.

According to energy expert Attila Holoda, consumer gas prices are not expected to fall as much as market prices, because the gas that reaches Hungarians comes from several sources, some of it from the expensive gas that we already bought. He said that the price reduction could be around 15-20 percent, and we will have to wait for that.

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Recently, the Hungarian Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó, was the only one who negotiated with Moscow on gas supplies. He said that, despite many people calling him a “piece of shit”, this is the reason why gas supplies to Hungarian households are guaranteed. But Attila Holoda said this was nonsense.

“We don’t live only from storage, we have domestic production and imports,” he said. And imports are increasing, and buyers who buy together in larger volumes can negotiate better prices on the world market – which is the thinking behind the EU’s joint gas purchases. The expert therefore does not think that it is necessarily wise for the Hungarian government to go it alone and buy less gas more expensively instead of relying on joint EU purchases.

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Source: rtl.hu, G7