They declared a state of pre-emergency. They are already cutting off some industrial sectors, which adds to the interruptions to CNG stations. They seek to avoid affecting home service.
The national government activated gas cuts to the industry to try to avoid a blackout in domestic supply, given the supply problems that are being recorded in various parts of the country, a situation that in the province of Buenos Aires has its epicenter in the cities of Mar del Plata and La Plata.
Energas, which declared a state of “pre-emergency,” sent a note to gas distributors and transporters to guarantee supply to residential users, what is technically known as “priority demand,” which extended the cuts from the CNG stations to industries.
The most critical area in Buenos Aires territory so far is La Plata, where queues of more than a kilometer were recorded to load CNG since in the city only five establishments have “firm” contracts, that is, non-interruptible. In Mar del Plata two thirds of the stations have this type of contracts.
In recent days, distributors also began to cut off gas to industries with interruptible contracts and also to those with “firm, but with a window” contracts. That is, the distributor can cut off up to a certain volume of cubic meters of gas for a certain period of time, during the period of low temperatures, which extends from May to September, and after having cut off the gas to the interruptibles.
In particular, companies in the textile, beverage, wood and ceramic sectors were affected.
“The gas cutoff has not yet been reached for users with pure firm contracts,” the Government said, which would mean reaching a state of Emergency, one more step with respect to the emergency declared until now.
The arrival of the cold wave, which the government only expected in June, revealed the lack of completion of the Néstor Kirchner gas pipeline, which needs to install compressor plants. According to a portal specialized in energy issues, this occurred because the government did not execute items for between 14 and 40 million dollars within the framework of the fiscal adjustment. But now, in the midst of the supply bottleneck, it had to buy liquid fuel abroad for between 500 and 500 million dollars to replace the missing gas.
