Germany loses Gazprom pipeline appeal as court sides with Poland

Berlin lost its fight against a ruling limiting Gazprom's access to the OPAL pipeline that links the Russian gas producer's Nord Stream pipeline to Germany after Europe's top court sided with Poland.

The case is part of a long-running dispute over the transportation of Russian gas to Europe, which has pitted Poland and other eastern European countries against Germany.

Opal links the Nord Stream 1 pipeline with onshore European grids. The 470-km (292 miles) pipeline runs from northern Germany to the Czech Republic and has an annual capacity of 36 billion cubic metres of natural gas.

Russian plans to double its gas export capacity to Germany via its Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which will use an onshore link of its own, called Eugal.

Germany appealed to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) after a lower tribunal in 2019 annulled an EU decision allowing Gazprom to boost deliveries to Europe via the OPAL pipeline.

The tribunal's ruling followed a Polish challenge to the decision by the European Commission, the EU executive.

The CJEU rejected Germany's arguments that "energy solidarity" is a political concept rather than a legal issue, saying the Commission is required to examine the possible risks for security of gas supply on the markets of the EU countries.

"The legality of any act of the EU institutions falling within the European Union's energy policy must be assessed in the light of the principle of energy solidarity," judges said.

The case is C-848/19 P Germany v Poland.

The ruling is unlikely to change Gazprom flow on Opal which was already reduced before the court case.

Gazprom Export, the export arm of Russia's state gas company Gazprom, despite not being a direct party in the dispute, said in a statement on Thursday it regretted the court's ruling.

"We are disappointed by the creation of artificial barriers for an effective usage of investments into the European gas system," the statement said.

OPAL Gastransport also said in a separate statement issued in Germany that it regretted the court's decision and upheld its opinion that the EU single market was not disadvantaged through the full use of OPAL's transport capacities.

"A decision on the matter whether Poland was actually damaged by the full use of the OPAL by various shippers was expressly not made," the Kassel-based firm said. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, additional reporting by Vera Eckert in Frankfurt, Katya Golubkova and Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow; editing by David Goodman, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Timothy Heritage)

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