22OCT

ACER names Hungary, Slovakia at TurkStream

4 min read

17:24UTC

ACER's 6 May derogation opinions covered seven national regulators, and named Hungary and Slovakia among the EU member states most exposed at the TurkStream entry ahead of the 5 August code-application date.

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Key takeaway

Hungary and Slovakia face a regulatory checkpoint on TurkStream entry from 5 August.

ACER, the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, published opinions on 6 May covering derogation requests from seven national regulatory authorities (NRAs) on EU gas network code application at third-country interconnection points. The seven NRAs are Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain. The codes apply from 5 August 2026.

ACER is the Ljubljana-based EU body that coordinates national energy regulators and enforces the recast REMIT (Regulation on Wholesale Energy Market Integrity and Transparency) wholesale market rules in force from 29 April. Network codes set the technical, balancing and transaction-reporting standards for cross-border gas; at a third-country entry, they bind the EU side only, which is the structural problem the derogations target.

ACER found that Hungary and Bulgaria had implemented the codes "to the maximum extent possible" pending neighbouring Russian and Turkish operators' simultaneous implementation. Hungary and Slovakia are the two EU member states most dependent on the TurkStream pipeline, which ran at roughly 41 mcm/day in April routing Russian gas through Turkey and the Balkans. The bottleneck on third-country TSO (transmission system operator) cooperation is therefore concentrated on the route already carrying the bloc's heaviest physical-supply political risk.

Final decisions sit with the European Commission. If derogations are granted, EU measurement, balancing and REMIT transaction-reporting standards do not bind at the TurkStream entry from August. For desks running cross-border positions through Hungarian and Slovak hubs, the 5 August date is now a discrete regulatory checkpoint.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The EU has rules about how gas should be measured, balanced, and reported when it crosses international borders into Europe. These rules were designed to make the gas market transparent and prevent price manipulation. TurkStream is a pipeline that carries Russian gas through Turkey and the Balkans into Hungary and Slovakia. The problem is that Russia and Turkey, who run the pipeline on their side of the border, do not follow EU rules. Europe can only set rules for EU members, not for Russia or Turkey. ACER, the EU energy regulator, has now formally acknowledged this gap. Hungary and Slovakia, the countries that rely most on TurkStream, asked for an exemption from the rules they technically cannot enforce at the border. ACER has given its opinion; now the European Commission has to decide whether to grant the exemption.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The structural cause is the 2019 recast Gas Directive's provision exempting new pipelines from third-country operators from unbundling and network code requirements, the provision that Russia successfully used to seek and receive (initially, before later being reversed) regulatory carve-outs for Nord Stream 2.

TurkStream was built and operates under an expectation of permanent exceptionalism from the EU regulatory framework, because the regulatory framework as designed cannot compel third-country TSO compliance.

The 5 August 2026 application date creates the immediate pressure: REMIT 2.0's transaction reporting obligations and the network code balancing standards that ACER is now opining on were designed as a coherent package. If TurkStream's entry point operates outside REMIT-equivalent transaction reporting from August, positions crossing the Hungarian and Slovak entry hubs carry a measurement and audit gap that compliance functions at trading houses will need to account for.

What could happen next?

Risk
If the Commission grants derogations without conditions, REMIT 2.0 transaction reporting standards will not bind at TurkStream's EU entry from 5 August, creating an audit gap for cross-border positions referencing Hungarian and Slovak gas hubs.
Short term · 0.7
Consequence
A denied derogation creates a compliance default at TurkStream entry from 5 August without any practical mechanism to force Russian-Turkish TSO cooperation, meaning the denied outcome is a regulatory fiction rather than an enforcement improvement.
Short term · 0.8
Precedent
The ACER opinion establishes TurkStream as the test case for how EU network code architecture handles permanent third-country route dependencies, with implications for any future non-EU interconnection that cannot be governed through EEA-adjacent bilateral frameworks.
Long term · 0.82

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: The 2009 Nabucco gas pipeline regulatory framework exposed the same third-country coordination problem: EU network code application at the Turkey-Bulgaria entry point required Botaş (Turkish state gas company) to implement corresponding rules, which it declined to do.

The result was a regulatory carve-out that effectively placed Turkish-origin gas flows outside the balancing and transaction-reporting standards that applied to all other entry points. TurkStream is legally and operationally the successor to that architecture; the ACER opinion addresses the same structural gap Nabucco exposed seventeen years ago without resolving it.

Counter-parallel: Norway's Gas Dialogue framework (2003–present) demonstrated that a non-EU gas supplier can accept network code compatibility requirements through a bilateral EEA-adjacent agreement without EU membership.

Norway is not EU-regulated, but the Gassled interconnection operates under harmonised standards because both sides accepted them commercially. Russia has explicitly refused any equivalent arrangement on TurkStream, which is why the simultaneity problem remains open while the Norwegian route closed.

The practical trading-desk implication runs through cross-hub basis positions. Desks running Hungarian Gas Exchange (HUPX) or Slovak gas hub positions against TTF carry a basis that already embeds TurkStream political risk. From 5 August, they would also carry a regulatory basis: the absence of REMIT-equivalent reporting at TurkStream entry means cross-border position reconstruction for ACER surveillance purposes becomes incomplete on the TurkStream leg.

For compliance functions at Category A market participants (those with mandatory REMIT transaction reporting), the question is whether cross-border positions that reference TurkStream-entry gas flows require additional documentation or partial exemption treatment from 5 August. No ACER guidance has yet been issued specifically on this point, and the Madrid Gas Regulatory Forum passed without clarifying it.

Consensus view: Florence School of Regulation (European University Institute, Fiesole) assessed in its March 2026 gas network code implementation review that the third-country simultaneity problem, where EU network codes require bilateral implementation but third-country transmission system operators face no reciprocal obligation, was foreseeable from the 2019 recast Gas Directive framework.

The regulatory gap at TurkStream's entry point is not a compliance failure by Hungary or Slovakia; it is a structural design limitation in how the Gas Directive addressed non-EU interconnectors. ACER's opinion accurately identifies this as a third-country TSO problem, not an NRA problem.

Counter-view: The Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority (MEKH) argues that the derogation request itself signals the limitation of Brussels-centric network code design: a regulatory framework that cannot bind Russian or Turkish operators creates an asymmetric compliance burden on member states that depend on those routes.

MEKH's position, consistent with the Hungarian government's broader energy sovereignty arguments, is that permanent structural derogations are more appropriate than case-by-case Commission decisions, an argument that the European Commission's energy security framework explicitly resists.

Key tension: Whether the TurkStream derogation should be a permanent structural accommodation of a third-country route that the EU cannot regulate, or a time-limited measure while the route itself is being systematically unwound through supply diversification.

Sources:ACER

Mentions:ACER →Hungary →Slovakia →Bulgaria →Estonia →Lithuania →Spain →Italy →TurkStream →European Commission →Russia →REMIT →Norway →European University Institute →Gassled →Balkans →Turkey →Madrid Gas Regulatory Forum →

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Causes and effects

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ACER names Hungary, Slovakia at TurkStream

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Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.