Anyone in Bulgaria wanting to buy natural gas for household or company use used to have to turn to the state-run gas supplier Bulgargaz or to the far smaller private company Overgas. Both suppliers sold Russian gas and competing with each other was not really on their agenda, as they obviously had an agreement – whether over or under the table  - on how to divide up the market between themselves.

But as of the beginning of this month all this has changed and gas can now be bought directly from Greece and very soon – from Romania and Ukraine. New suppliers are now permitted to enter the market though actually consumers don’t really care where the natural gas they need will come from. A smallish machine building company from Haskovo in Southern Bulgaria spearheaded the move towards free trade, buying symbolical amounts of Greek gas from a major international supplier just to test the market.

Experts in the country have been saying that in actual fact, these are virtual deliveries and deals, simply because the gas that can, for the time being, be purchased only from Greece, does not come from there, but is taken from the pipeline traversing the country to deliver gas to our neighbor to the South. But as virtual as the deals themselves may be, the Greek gas purchased is very real.

What the future is of international gas trading in Bulgaria is as yet pretty unclear, as the gas transmission system in the country is still state-owned, property of Bulgartransgaz. Even at this time the authorities in Bulgaria are at odds with Brussels over this, with Brussels demanding the privatization of the gas transmission systems and allowing pipelines by other suppliers. At the risk of sanctions of 300 million euro - far too much for the country’s modest finances – Sofia is nonetheless adamant it wants to keep state control, regarding the gas pipelines as an element of the country’s national security system.

There is one more thing that is definitely unclear in the future of the free gas market in Bulgaria – the prices and the model set down by the electric energy market, now free of state regulation. The new gas sources have to offer consumers better financial conditions, otherwise they will have no incentive or reason to throw over their trade partners. And that is by no means certain, as in practice, at this time they are all getting their gas from one source and one source only – the Russian giant Gazprom which is not treating any of the countries Bulgaria could buy gas from, any differently. Moreover, the liberalization of the electricity market shows that if there can be any benefits for the end users, they can only come over time – nobody knows how long – and that supplanting the existing monopolists would be a slow and difficult job. All this means that liberalizing any energy market is by no means a magic wand that would clear away all existing problems.

Yet liberalizing gas transmission is welcome news for one of the pet projects of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov – a gas hub on the Black Sea that would supply gas to Central and Eastern European countries near and far, following the principle of free trading. One of the big mysteries connected with this future hub is where it will get the gas from. Because you can’t have a market without goods. Now a window of opportunity is opening for dealers, consumers as well as competition.

English version: Milena Daynova