Reverse Flow Project: capacities available to the market as from 1 June 2018

The Reverse Flow project is progressing as planned. As of now, market participants can book with FluxSwiss capacity to flow gas from Italy to France starting from 1 June 2018 onwards.

Two-step approach

The Italy to France capacity offered by FluxSwiss is the first step in marketing the newly available south-to-north reverse flow capacity linking the PSV gas trading place in Italy to the NCG, PEG, TTF and ZTP gas trading places in Germany, France, The Netherlands and Belgium respectively.

In a second step, capacity in Switzerland from Italy to both France and Germany will be available as from 1 October 2018, while at the same time in Germany capacity will become available to flow gas from Switzerland to both Belgium and the Netherlands. Market participants will be able to book the latter as from early July during the annual auction on PRISMA.

Successful inter-TSO cooperation

Fluxys took the final investment decision to enable south-to-north flows in the Transitgas system in Switzerland and the TENP system in Germany in early 2015. Making available the technical capacities to flow gas landing in Italy to Northwest Europe establishes the north/south transmission backbone to Italy as a fully bidirectional link and serves a double objective: improving security of supply and fully integrating the PSV gas trading place in Italy with the gas trading places in Northwest Europe.

Over the last three years the commercial and technical teams at Fluxys TENP, FluxSwiss, Transitgas, Swissgas, OGE, GRTgaz and Snam Rete Gas have put great effort to offer the market the reverse flow capacities as planned on 1 October 2018. The TSOs also took care to coordinate and align with all parties so as to meet both local and cross-border market needs.