German Chancellor Angela Merkel was
urged by Bavaria’s state government to create a national gas
reserve as Russia’s Gazprom OAO (GAZP) prepared to control about a
fifth of the country’s storage capacity.

“Foreign companies” are buying up gas storage and may be
able to control supplies for “strategic purposes,” the
Bavarian chancellery in Munich said today in a statement. The
proposal is scheduled for debate tomorrow in the German
parliament’s upper house, or Bundesrat.

Bavaria, home to companies such as Linde AG, Siemens AG (SIE) and
Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), is reacting to Gazprom’s
acquisition of sole control over German gas storage company
Wingas GmbH this year in an asset swap with BASF SE (BAS)’s
Wintershall unit. Kassel, Germany-based Wingas owns about 20
percent of national storage capacity.

Germany’s Economy Ministry, run by Merkel’s Social
Democratic coalition allies, declined to endorse the Bavarian
plan. Germany’s experience with companies that supply the
nation’s gas has been “good,” ministry spokesman Adrian
Toschev said in an e-mailed reply to questions. “That said, the
role of storage facilities is being discussed,” he said.

Germany’s gas storage capacity of 21 billion cubic meters
is the world’s fourth-largest and covers about a fifth of annual
consumption, Toschev said. “At this time, there are no
indications of any supply bottlenecks,” he said.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Brian Parkin in Berlin at
bparkin@bloomberg.net;
Julia Mengewein in Frankfurt at
jmengewein@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Alan Crawford at
acrawford6@bloomberg.net
Tony Czuczka, Eddie Buckle