ACOMES meeting 2019

30th annual coordinating meeting of entity stockholders – ACOMES took place in Rome, Italy on September 9th and 10th, 2019. ACOMES meeting is a venue where representatives of the stockholding agencies and organisations that keep emergency oil stocks meet annually to share experience, knowledge and best practice of keeping the emergency stocks. This year’s meeting was attended by representatives from 28 countries from Europe, Asia and northern America. Slovak Republic was represented by two delegates from the Emergency Oil Stocks Agency and one delegate from the Administration of State Material Reserves of the Slovak Republic.

ACOMES meeting deals with various topics related to technical, organisational and financial aspects of the emergency stockholding. Main topic areas of this year’s meeting were especially oil emergency policies in times of energy transition, solutions of real-life oil and petroleum products disruptions from recent months, emergency stocks in connection with critical infrastructure legislation, regulation on maritime fuels IMO 2020, biofuels issue in emergency stocks and so on.

Representative of the Emergency Oil Stocks Agency contributed to the agenda with presentation on experience of the Slovak Republic from May 2019 emergency situation, which was caused by complete shut-down of Russian crude oil transport to Europe through Druzhba pipeline due to its contamination. This situation meant complete stop of crude oil supplies to the country. It needed to be solved by using of the emergency stocks to allow the refinery to continue its operation and supplying domestic market with petroleum products. Use of the emergency stocks took form of temporary exchange of Agency’s crude oil stocks for the refinery’s products stocks. This way the refinery was supplied with necessary crude oil during the emergency situation and the emergency stocks of the EOSA Agency never dropped below minimal required limit of 90 days of daily net imports.