With gas storage data gaining increased attention due to the consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine, I have written a package to access the API of Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE).
It has not been until Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine in February of 2022 that daily data on gas storage facilities in Europe would be an interesting topic to deal with for a broader public. Yet, in response to the sanctions put in place by the European Union, Russia has reduced the flow of natural gas to EU countries (thereby exploiting their huge dependency on Russian gas, probably for political reasons). In many countries, it is now questionable as to whether the gas storage facilities will hold enough gas to get through winter time.
This is why politicians, journalists, managers and statisticians are now in need for high frequency, reliable data on gas storage facilities. In Europe, they are provided by Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE). For their AGSI+/ALSI+ transparency platform they offer an API that provides all available data on gas storage, the most important data being filling level as well as inflow and outflow.
Right after people started searching for gas storage data with the
start of the war, GIE changed the architecture of their API
fundamentally, introducing pagination and updating most endpoints and
parameters. Since there was no pre-existing R package that could work
with the new architecture, I decided to write it myself. As a result,
{giedata} was published on CRAN in July 2022. Here, I want
to give a short overview of what it offers:
The first step in a possible workflow would be to fetch the metadata
of the available gas storage companies and their facilities in a given
region or country. In this example, I will fetch all gas storage
companies in Germany including their facilities, using the first of
three main functions of the package, get_gielisting():
storage <- giedata::get_gielisting(region = "Europe",
country = "Germany",
facilities = TRUE)
head(storage, n = 5)# A tibble: 5 × 9
facility_eic facility_name facility_type company_eic country
<chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1 21Z000000000271O UGS Rehden Storage Faci… 21X0000000… Germany
2 21W0000000001148 UGS Jemgum H (as… Storage Faci… 21X0000000… Germany
3 21W0000000001261 VSP NORD (Rehden… Storage Group 21X0000000… Germany
4 21W0000000000184 UGS Wolfersberg Storage Faci… 37X0000000… Germany
5 21W0000000001083 UGS Berlin Storage Faci… 37X0000000… Germany
# … with 4 more variables: country_code <chr>,
# company_shortname <chr>, company_name <chr>, company_url <chr>Based on this information, we can then use the function
get_giedata() to download the data from AGSI+/ALSI+ (ALSI+
for liquefied natural gas is not yet supported for the new API
architecture). From the data set above we see that the unique ID (EIC)
of the company “astora” is 21X000000001160J, we can use
that now (from the data set above we, too, get the EIC of the storage
unit in Rehden):
data <- giedata::get_giedata(country = "DE",
company = "21X000000001160J",
facility = "21Z000000000271O",
from = "2022-01-01",
to = "2022-01-05")
head(data)# A tibble: 5 × 13
name code url gasDayStart gasInStorage injection withdrawal
<chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 UGS Rehden 21Z0… 21Z0… 2022-01-01 2.86 229. 0
2 UGS Rehden 21Z0… 21Z0… 2022-01-02 3.00 138. 0
3 UGS Rehden 21Z0… 21Z0… 2022-01-03 3.08 79.7 0
4 UGS Rehden 21Z0… 21Z0… 2022-01-04 3.16 86.1 0
5 UGS Rehden 21Z0… 21Z0… 2022-01-05 3.15 0 12.6
# … with 6 more variables: workingGasVolume <dbl>,
# injectionCapacity <dbl>, withdrawalCapacity <dbl>, status <chr>,
# trend <dbl>, full <dbl>The last of three main functions is get_giedata2() and
is a generalised version of get_giedata() that allows you
to download data for multiple countries, companies or facilities at once
so you do not have to loop over get_giedata() yourself:
data2 <- giedata::get_giedata2(countries = c("DE", "NL", "AT"),
date = "2022-07-01")
head(data2)# A tibble: 3 × 15
name code url gasDayStart gasInStorage consumption
<chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <dbl> <dbl>
1 Germany DE DE 2022-07-01 149. 995.
2 Netherlands NL NL 2022-07-01 75.6 420.
3 Austria AT AT 2022-07-01 43.2 98.1
# … with 9 more variables: consumptionFull <dbl>, injection <dbl>,
# withdrawal <dbl>, workingGasVolume <dbl>,
# injectionCapacity <dbl>, withdrawalCapacity <dbl>, status <chr>,
# trend <dbl>, full <dbl>Note that due to the design of the API the functionality of
get_giedata2() is - as of yet - a tiny bit complicated: You
can specify multiple countries and get the data on the country level.
Once you want to get data on companies, you can only specify one
country, and all EIC codes provided must be of this country’s origin.
The same holds for facilities: You can get data for mulitple facilities
at once, but the country and company EIC must be of length one.
Case 1: Country + companies
data3 <- giedata::get_giedata2(countries = "DE",
companies = c("21X000000001160J",
"37X0000000000151"),
date = "2022-01-01")
head(data3)# A tibble: 2 × 13
name code url gasDayStart gasInStorage injection withdrawal
<chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 astora (G… 21X0… 21X0… 2022-01-01 8.28 241. 0.5
2 bayernugs 37X0… 37X0… 2022-01-01 1.82 0 10.5
# … with 6 more variables: workingGasVolume <dbl>,
# injectionCapacity <dbl>, withdrawalCapacity <dbl>, status <chr>,
# trend <dbl>, full <dbl>Case 2: Company + facilities
data4 <- giedata::get_giedata2(countries = "DE",
companies = "21X000000001160J",
facilities = c("21Z000000000271O",
"21W0000000001148"),
date = "2022-01-01")
head(data4)# A tibble: 2 × 13
name code url gasDayStart gasInStorage injection withdrawal
<chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 UGS Rehden 21Z0… 21Z0… 2022-01-01 2.86 229. 0
2 UGS Jemgu… 21W0… 21W0… 2022-01-01 5.42 11.5 0.5
# … with 6 more variables: workingGasVolume <dbl>,
# injectionCapacity <dbl>, withdrawalCapacity <dbl>, status <chr>,
# trend <dbl>, full <dbl>Lastly, I hope this package is of use to you and if you have any query or suggestion, do not hesitate and hop over to Github and create an issue.