Headquartered in Vienna, RAG Austria AG is the country’s largest energy storage company, and one of Europe’s leading storage facility operators. The company also develops innovative energy technologies related to green gas and hydrogen that partner renewables.
RAG’s primary focus is on the responsible storage, conversion and needs-based conditioning of energy in gaseous forms. This enables RAG to play a vital role in attaining Europe’s climate goals and ensuring sustainable material and energy supplies in Austria. The company is committed to providing its customers with reliable, environmentally friendly and affordable energy and gas storage services over the long term.
RAG’s innovation capabilities have enabled it to become a sustainable technology leader in the European energy storage and supply sector. With storage capacity of around 6.3 billion cubic metres of natural gas, the company operates about 6 % of total EU capacity. A large part of RAG’s underground gas reservoirs have already been converted into storage facilities, which can rapidly discharge stored energy in large quantities on demand. In this way, RAG is delivering on its vision of ‘sustainable energy mining‘ and decisively reinforcing security of supply in Austria and Central Europe. In future, sustainable, high-volume storage facilities will also increasingly be used for the seasonal storage of green gas and hydrogen, which can then be processed and made available whenever it is needed.
RAG has developed and now operates a total of eleven pore storage facilities in Salzburg and Upper Austria. They include the Puchkirchen/Haag, Haidach, Haidach 5 and Aigelsbrunn facilities, the 7Fields interconnected network, as well as the hydrogen storage facilities in Pilsbach and Rubensdorf. Besides providing storage capacity for gaseous energy forms, the company aims to ensure the efficient utilisation of reservoirs. Our customers own the gas stored at our facilities, and they take decisions regarding sources of supply as well as energy use and application. Storage levels are updated and published daily by the storage marketing companies through the AGSI+ transparency platform (agsi.gie.eu).
More Details: Our Storage Facilities
The company is working hard to develop innovative, groundbreaking energy technologies related to green gas and hydrogen that partner renewables – ranging from power-to-gas technology to methane electrolysis – and is also looking at uses for conventional natural gas. RAG is regarded as a pioneer in hydrogen production and storage thanks to its involvement in several research and demonstration projects, such as the water electrolysis plant in Pilsbach, Upper Austria, which has been in operation since 2015.
In terms of transport and mobility, the company uses and markets gas as a fuel (in the form of CNG and LNG). In the future, it will also be possible to use green or synthetic gas produced from renewables for transportation purposes, in addition to conventional natural gas – this is important because gas-fired power generation, one of the most common uses of these gases, is not the most efficient application. LNG technology, which has now reached the volume production stage, is a lower-emission alternative to diesel engines, especially in heavy goods vehicles. RAG’s current research and development activities are opening up new horizons in this regard.
Around 240,000 tonnes of crude oil are stored at RAG’s Krift tank farm (in Kremsmünster, Upper Austria), which has eco-friendly connections to the pipeline and rail transportation networks. The tanks are used to store oil produced by RAG subsidiary RAG Exploration und Production GmbH, and also to offer capacity to customers in its role as an approved stockholder, which in turn ensures compliance with the legal requirement for the short-term and long-term storage of minimum reserves (compulsory emergency reserves). This enhances security of supply in Austria by creating buffer stocks to safeguard supplies in an emergency.
Thanks to its decades of experience and valuable subsurface engineering expertise, RAG can support the implementation of geothermal projects as required. RAG subsidiary Silenos Energy successfully commissioned a geothermal plant with a water-cooling system for the first time in Garching an der Alz in Germany.
With operations in Upper Austria and Salzburg, RAG Exploration & Production GmbH specialises in the efficient, environmentally friendly production of mineral oil and natural gas – both of these valuable raw materials are used for high-quality processing in Austrian industry – and plays its part in reducing dependence on imports. Approximately 8 % of the natural gas required in Austria comes from domestic ground, of which RAG in turn produced an amount of approximately 78.5 million cubic meters of natural gas (from primary production) in 2022. With about 50,300 tons of crude oil, RAG was able to provide the raw material for high-quality further processing in domestic industry with about 12 % of Austria‘s domestic production.
