Remain hugely dependent – costs explode: gas prices have already tripled

While the federal government repeatedly emphasizes that it wants to run out of Russian gas as soon as possible, the import figures indicate that this project is unlikely to be particularly easy.

Imports more expensive than ever
The NEOS-Lab has now evaluated the current gas imports based on the figures from Statistics Austria. This showed that due to the enormous increase in gas prices, imports are already more expensive than ever before.

Five billion for the war fund
In March 2022 alone, Austria paid about 633 billion euros for Russian gas – in March of the previous year it was only 181 million euros. That is no less than three times as much. In total, Austrian gas imports alone flushed some five billion euros into the Russian (war) coffers within twelve months. In previous years, this value was between one and two billion a year.

The Department of Energy has already confirmed the jump in costs to the Ö1 “Journals”. In a forecast in April, the NEOS Lab estimated that the costs for Russian gas imports could rise to more than 7 billion euros per year if prices in the gas markets do not ease significantly or import volumes are drastically reduced.

dependence increased even further
While Germany has announced that it wants to reduce its dependence on Russian gas from 55 percent to 35 percent, Russia’s share of imports into Austria has actually increased – already accounting for 87 percent of total gas imported.

In addition, the empty gas storage tanks must be filled with gas by October, which is now significantly more expensive. That could drive up the costs of Russian gas imports even more in the coming months.