We are Gasunie

We are Gasunie

In the heart of north-western Europe, Gasunie manages, maintains and develops infrastructure for the large-scale transmission, storage and conversion of energy. At the moment, this is mainly natural gas, but with the energy transition this is increasingly shifting towards CO2 and hydrogen. Besides this, we promote the development of the technology for green gas and the feed-in of this gas, and we work on the construction and management of heat grids.

Our role in the energy value chain

We provide third parties non-discriminatory access to our services at non-discriminatory tariffs. The Dutch State is our sole shareholder. Our employees are spread over more than thirty locations in the Netherlands and northern Germany, with delegations in Brussels and Berlin. Our headquarters are in Groningen (the Netherlands), and our main German office is located in Hanover.


Our role in the energy supply chain in the Netherlands and northern Germany

Our infrastructure services connect energy producers to energy consumers. Our current infrastructure functions as an international hub for the supply and transit of gas in north-western Europe. This enables us to contribute to a liquid, competitive and reliable European energy market. Additionally, we invest in projects relating to hydrogen, heat, CCS and green gas. We work towards accelerating the achievement of climate neutrality in the energy supply by developing sustainable energy value chains.

Our company

Gasunie has two large, regulated subsidiaries. Gasunie Transport Services (GTS) and Gasunie Deutschland (GUD) manage the high-pressure gas transmission systems in the Netherlands and north-western Germany, respectively. Regulatory authorities ACM (in the Netherlands) and BNetzA (in Germany) set our permitted revenues and, by extension, the tariffs every year.

GTS and GUD sell the available capacity on their networks to market parties. Customers feed gas into the network at entry points and take gas off from the network at exit points. To arrange this, they sign contracts to reserve capacity at specific network entry or exit points over a specific period (year, quarter, month or day).

Gasunie also holds participating interests in companies that offer energy infrastructure and related services that are (for the time being) either only partly subject to regulation or entirely exempt. Customers buy capacity, which entitles them to use the relevant infrastructure during a certain period. The tariffs for these services are non-discriminatory and mainly determined by supply and demand. The operations of the companies in which we hold participating interests support the functioning and liquidity of the energy market in the Netherlands and Germany.


Our gas TSOs and our major participating interests

Mission, vision and strategy

Our mission
Gasunie is a leading European energy infrastructure company. Gas transport, transmission and storage have been the core of our business for 60 years now. We serve the public interest and facilitate the energy transition by providing integrated infrastructure services. We focus on value creation for our shareholder and other stakeholders and apply the highest safety and business standards used in the sector.

Our vision
We believe in a sustainable future with a balanced energy mix and a lasting role for diversified gases. We believe that we serve our customers best with innovative gas and related infrastructure solutions.

Our strategy

Gasunie pursues a three-pillar strategy resting on the foundations of our organisation

In 2023, Gasunie started revising its mission, vision and strategy. The Supervisory Board and the shareholder are closely involved in this process, as are the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and other stakeholders. The strategy review will be completed in 2024.

How we create value

Gasunie’s value creation model shows how we use the six capitals of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) in our company to implement our strategic priorities. We create economic and social value and, in doing so, we have both positive and negative impacts on society. With our positive impacts we contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.


How Gasunie creates value

Impact on society

Our impact report
As a public company, Gasunie needs to carefully consider how it can strike the right balance between financial returns, social returns and environmental returns. This year we are taking an extra step and publishing, for the first time, an impact report. For more information on how and why we are reporting on our impact, we refer the reader to the sections Guide to this report and Additional information. In the coming years it will become possible to compare the impact reports of Dutch infrastructure operators.


Our impact report
(in millions of euros)

  • Financial capital

    Financial capital means the monetary resources available to a company which the company can use to produce its goods and/or provide its services. ‘Extracting’ money from other parties has a negative impact, while paying other parties money has a positive impact. The figures shown here correspond to the information in our financial statements.

  • Manufactured capital

    Manufactured capital comprises human-produced inputs (goods, fixed assets, infrastructure, etc.) a company uses to produce its goods and/or provide its services. Reliable access to natural gas adds considerable value to society, such as having a warm house in winter and enabling industrial companies to operate whenever they want. In 2023, Gasunie’s share in this was € 818 million for homes and € 315 million for business end users in its core markets of the Netherlands and the northern part of Germany.

  • Intellectual capital

    New business and market models and the use of sustainable energy result in knowledge and data. This knowledge and data forms intellectual capital that can make a positive contribution to bringing about the energy transition, a circular society and broad prosperity. We use our knowledge and data in our role as advisor and sounding board for government and businesses. Transparency, innovation and collaboration are key concepts for determining intellectual capital.

  • Human capital

    Human capital encompasses aspects like people’s competencies, capabilities and experience and their motivation to innovate, often within the domain of the company’s operations. Gasunie contributes to human capital, like through the increase in employee wellbeing, or through employee development on the job. The company does, however, also have a negative impact, for example by extracting labour that could be used elsewhere in society, or due to occupational disability or incidents involving employees or local communities as a result of the company’s operations. We are strongly committed to ensuring the safety of our staff and so we have quantified the impact of accidents and work-related sickness absence and arrived at a value of just over € 248,000.

  • Social capital

    How stakeholders experience and value what we do and how we do it is part of our social capital. A good reputation offers opportunities for collaboration, employee recruitment and customer satisfaction.

  • Natural capital

    Natural capital refers to all renewable and non-renewable resources and processes from the environment that provide a company’s goods and/or services that support prosperity (in the past, present and/or future). Elements related to natural capital include the use of finite materials or exhaustible fossil fuels, for example, or damage caused through air pollution or climate change. Gasunie emits greenhouse gases itself and also facilitates the emission of greenhouse gases by the end users who use the gases the company transports. On the other hand, we also take measures to reduce our emissions.

    In this equation, the impact of regenerative green gas is on balance lower than that of exhaustible natural gas. By increasing the share of green gas, the negative impact can be reduced further in the future. Using LNG has a greater impact than using locally produced gas. For 2023, the contribution to climate change has been quantified at a value of € 145 million*.  The impact on natural capital can be positive by limiting climate change, for example through the purchase of Guarantees of Origin. In 2023, Gasunie had decarbonised emissions relating to its own energy consumption, for a positive impact worth € 21 million.

* When determining our contribution to climate change, we included our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions for 2023, as well as the part of our Scope 3 emissions for 2023 that was already known in January 2024 (which was limited). For a full understanding of our Scope 3 emissions, we would need to calculate the lifetime emissions of all capital goods we procured in 2023. To do this, we will need to collect and verify such a large quantity of data from suppliers and other parties that we will not yet be ready to disclose the results by the date of publication of this annual report. You can read more on our Scope 3 policy in the Emissions section.

Our impact on biodiversity

Five infrastructure companies work together to provide insight into the impact of business operations 

Impact aware
The Dutch infrastructure companies are working hard to bring about the energy transition. However, sustainable energy projects also have negative impacts on biodiversity. Only when we know the extent of that impact can we take targeted action. That is something we want to – and must – do, for example by implementing new standards and regulations, like the EU Taxonomy and CSRD. It was with this conviction that, together with the Impact Institute and peer infrastructure companies Alliander, the Port of Rotterdam, Stedin and Vitens, we worked on an impact measurement in 2023. Together we want to get a better handle on this important topic.

Procurement and own land use
For the measurement, the Impact Institute looked extensively at two aspects: the direct impact through own land use and the indirect impact through suppliers (upstream impact). After all, where there’s an office or installation there’s no room for a forest to grow. And for the pipes and other materials Gasunie procures, our suppliers and their suppliers cause negative impacts like water pollution, air pollution and carbon emissions. The Impact Institute used sector averages and other standards to put a price tag on the negative impacts of our business operations.

Nearly € 92,000,000
There’s no getting around the findings stated in the impact report. The 272 hectares Gasunie manages in the Netherlands led to a biodiversity loss valued at € 820,000 in 2022. And the upstream impact was more than a hundred fold higher: € 91,000,000. This impact mainly comes down to our procurement of electricity and nitrogen. How are we doing compared to our peer infrastructure companies? Most of these had a similar ratio between upstream impact and impact through own land use. We now know that the impact per managed hectare and per euro in procured goods and services at Gasunie is relatively high. The whys and wherefores require additional research.

Plans for the future
The future requires a different way of working, with more attention to nature. Gasunie is already actively taking steps in this direction. Some of these steps are discussed elsewhere in this report, such as the procurement of Dutch wind energy, the ecological management of our sites, and attention to circularity principles in our tender process. With the valuable insights gained through the Impact Institute’s report, we can take an even more targeted approach to minimising the loss of biodiversity.

Our vision of the future

The climate targets are clear: carbon emissions in Europe will have been cut by at least 55% by 2030 (compared with 1990 levels), and the EU will have achieved climate neutrality by 2050. Though many countries, companies and citizens are taking measures, we are not there yet – far from it. The reports of scientists and rulings of the courts are as plain as day. To achieve the climate targets, the energy system will also have to change significantly. Renewable gaseous energy carriers like green gas and hydrogen are indispensable for the transition of industry and homes, as is carbon capture, transport and storage (CCS).


Dutch, German and EU climate targets

Investment agenda
Gasunie is working on a series of large-scale energy transition projects for which we intend to make an investment decision in the coming years. We expect the vast majority of these projects to be, either immediately or gradually, made subject to regulation, meaning that we will market these assets at regulated tariffs. For each project we look at tailor-made solutions that will keep the development and operating risks under control.


Gasunie wants to invest € 11.5 billion in the energy transition and security of supply through to 2030

(Amounts in millions of euros.)

According to our current estimates, the value of Gasunie’s total net investment agenda up to and including 2030 will come in at around € 11.5 billion. The investments in the gas infrastructure are replacement investments and investments in compression in the German gas network due to the large flows of gas coming from LNG terminals.

We want to carry out a number of projects with partners. Only Gasunie’s share in the investments is shown, and grants, for example, have already been deducted from this amount. There is a separate decision-making process for each project.

Integrated infrastructure survey
Energy grids connect energy supply with energy demand. The transmission of green energy requires major investments for installing new grids and adapting existing grids. Because we do not know what the world will look like, we take into account four future scenarios, each of which envisions achieving a carbon neutral society by 2050. It is Gasunie’s social duty to be able to serve society with our infrastructure no matter which scenario materialises. An in-depth elaboration of these scenarios is presented in the Integrated Infrastructure Survey 2030-2050 (II3050). As a result of the close collaboration between Gasunie, TenneT, regional grid operators and other stakeholders in drawing up this vision, II3050 is a broadly supported outlook and guidance for government bodies, market parties and grid operators.


Outline of the four II3050 scenarios

The key conclusions from the new II3050 report for Gasunie are:

  • Hydrogen, green gas, heat and CCS will be key elements in bringing about a zero-carbon future.
  • After 2030, we will need to more or less double the hydrogen transmission network planned to be completed by 2030, an expansion that can largely be facilitated by our existing gas infrastructure.
  • The storage of hydrogen is essential if we are to keep the supply and demand for energy in balance in the future. This can be done in abandoned salt caverns in the Netherlands and Germany.
  • In addition, research is needed to determine the extent to which we can store hydrogen in depleted gas fields. Such storage facilities can play a key role as a strategic buffer during periods of insufficient solar and wind energy generation and as a backup if we lose a portion of the imports.
  • The CCS network is not only a short-term solution: it will serve us in the long-term too. In the short term, we will transport captured CO2 to offshore storage fields to reduce industrial carbon emissions. In the long term, we will transport sustainable CO2 to industry for production processes that are currently still based on fossil resources (like oil).

Risks and opportunities
Gasunie has in recent years already started building this infrastructure for hydrogen, green gas, CO2 and heat. Regardless of which scenario plays out, Gasunie has an important role to play in the energy transition. However, the opportunities and risks  for our company differ per scenario. We have illustrated this in the visuals below.

* Aside from considering the II3050 scenarios, Gasunie has looked at its strategic risks and operational risks and the ways in which they are managed. The key control measures are included in the Additional information section of this report.


Risks and opportunities for Gasunie in the energy transition scenarios