DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG sold three underground natural gas storage facilities operating in southern Bavaria to Slovak NAFTA a.s., a company of the EPH Group.
NAFTA will continue DEA’s successful activities in the natural gas storage business. Wolfersberg gas storage facility has been in operation since 1973, Inzenham-West (near Rosenheim) since 1982 and the Breitbrunn/Eggstätt storage facility at the lake Chiemsee since 1996.
DEA is focusing its business operations on exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas. Within the scope of a strategic reorientation, DEA had spun off its gas storage business in 2017, followed by handing over of its storage activities pooled in its subsidiary DEA Speicher Holding GmbH & Co. KG, with some 60 employees, to NAFTA. The marketing unit DEA Speicher GmbH has likewise been transferred to NAFTA which will market existing storage capacity in the future.
NAFTA already has extensive experience and expertise in natural gas storage in western Slovakia and, by acquiring the three gas storage facilities from DEA, it will expand its existing storage capacity of about 2.7 billion m³ by approximately a further 1.8 billion m³.
For decades, natural gas, predominantly from Russia has been injected into the storage facilities in the low-consumption months in summer and then withdrawn again in the winter half-year, when the demand for gas rises. In this way, it was possible to offset fluctuations in production and consumption.
