Only privately owned vehicles, agricultural machines, tractors, and taxis can receive fuel at the guaranteed price of HuF 480, at the suggestion of Mol, according to the government’s decision, announced the minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Office on Saturday in Budapest.
Gergely Gulyás told at the so-called Kormányinfo that the check is “easy and fast” because the license has a bar code and it can be read easily. Mol has the right to store this data and is obliged to forward it to the tax office for inspection, he explained. He said that the decree would be published on Saturday.
According to Gulyás, as before, vehicles with Hungarian registration plates over 7.5 tons, as well as vehicles with foreign registration plates, can be refueled at the market price, but this also includes refueling from cans; from now on, vehicles maintained by non-natural persons may refuel at market prices – with the exception of vehicles providing passenger taxi services.
The minister justified the decision by saying that the Százhalombatta petroleum refinery, which covers 100 percent of Hungary’s needs, had to be shut down on Friday due to maintenance. He added: the fuel supply is thus now provided by imports and the release of a quarter of the strategic stocks.
He said that on Friday the president and CEO of Mol informed the government about the maintenance of the refinery, which has already been postponed once and cannot be postponed any longer. He noted that Mol refines Russian crude oil in Százhalombatta. According to his assessment, the war and the sanctions responses to it created an impossible situation in the field of energy supply in Europe, the price of crude oil and natural gas skyrocketed.
Due to the war and the sanctions, today no one can guarantee that the crude oil supply will be continuous in the fall and winter, therefore it is not possible to release the strategic stock, they can only release as much as there is a “real chance” to replace it in the next year and a half to three quarters, he explained.
Gergely Gulyás explained that the release of a quarter of the strategic stocks – together with the stocks at Mol – is only enough to satisfy part of the domestic needs, the rest must be covered by imports.
He went on to say that the price of imports is extremely high due to the war and sanctions, and that refined diesel oil cannot be imported from Russia from December, as it was “banned by Brussels”. He concluded that the remaining stocks are only sufficient for residential consumption.
The minister added: the Hungarian Petroleum Association informed the government on July 27th that imports had dropped significantly due to the official price and sanctions.
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