Our company Plinovodi d.o.o on Tuesday, the 17th of September 2019 held a traditional workshop with the title »Natural gas market in the Republic of Slovenia«.

The workshop was opened by General Manager of Plinovodi d.o.o. Marjan Eberlinc with a traditional opening address. He emphasized that natural gas in connection with green gases is our future and listed the latest infrastructure projects in Slovenia, as well as those important for international connection with neighbouring countries.

The first part of the workshop continued with presentations of regulatory and legislative novelties as well as the current and future development of customer services and the environmentally friendly focus of company Plinovodi d.o.o..

With the first presentation, Jošt Štrukelj covered the adaptation of the national legislation to the European legislation, which is expected to ensure tariff stability by harmonizing tariff systems at EU level. This was followed with the presentation by Marko Širovnik, who presented the utilization of the natural gas transmission system and the flows of natural gas at physical points and introduced the virtual point supported web application. After that, Matej Urh presented in more detail the development of Forecasting party project from the very conception and the progress of the project from the beginning in October 2018 and up to the present. Jan Šinigoj summarized the novelties of the project within the NUS "Network User Services" in the direction of digitization, which will be fully operational from October 2019. At the very end of the first part of the workshop, Franc Cimerman, Phd, in the framework of the ten-year development plan for the transmission system network for the period 2020 – 2029 revealed, that up to 70 municipalities in Slovenia could be connected to the transmission network (in addition to the existing ones) and specifically emphasized the preparation of the network for the future role of both natural and renewable gases.

In the second part, the future possibilities of natural gas in the energy sector were presented by company representatives and by visiting gas experts.

In his presentation, Marko Ileršič revealed the perspectives on transmission systems in recent European Commission documents for the development of a society with net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Franc Cimerman, Phd, and Matej Urh than presented Sustainable projects and sector coupling, where the gas transmission system acts as a reservoir of renewable gas, produced from excess renewable electricity.

In the second part, the presentations were followed by guest speakers, first among them was Urban Odar, who, as a representative of the GIZ DPZ, highlighted the state of CNG (compressed natural gas) in Slovenia in comparison with neighbouring countries and plans for the establishment of alternative fuel infrastructure in Slovenia. Mitja Mori, Phd, from Faculty Of Mechanical Engineering and Boštjan Jurjevčič, Phd, from the company Adriaplin d.o.o. in their Study of the environmental impacts of natural gas with life cycle assessment presented, that with better production of energy from natural gas and with higher number of CNG vehicles, environmental indicators for Slovenia would be significantly improved. Boris Vidrih, PhD, from Faculty Of Mechanical Engineering presented Comparative technical and economic analysis of gas heat pumps usage in the supply of heat and cooling energy in which it was proved that heat pumps with gas engine that uses water to water system, has the highest efficiency.

We would again like to thank all the participants for their participation and attendance.