SciGRID_gas -- Data Model of the European Gas Transport Network

TL;DR

This paper presents an open-source, detailed model of the European gas transport network, created using publicly available data, to support energy system modeling and transition efforts.

Contribution

The authors developed the first comprehensive open-data model of Europe's gas network, integrating multiple data sources and methods to fill data gaps.

Findings

Model includes 237,000 km of pipelines.

Provides datasets for stations, terminals, storage, and demand.

Addresses data gaps and future improvements.

Abstract

The current transition in the European energy sector towards climate neutrality requires detailed and reliable energy system modeling. The quality and relevance of the energy system modeling highly depend on the availability and quality of model input datasets. However, detailed and reliable datasets, especially for energy infrastructure, are still missing. In this contribution, we present our approach to developing an open-source and open-data model of the gas transport network in Europe. Various freely available data sources were used to collect gas transport datasets and their attributes. The resulting datasets of the various data sources were processed, and unique elements were merged together. Statistical and heuristic methods were used to generate missing network element attributes. As a result, we successfully created a gas transport network model only using open-source data. The SciGRID_gas model contains 237.000 km of pipeline data which is a very good approximation to know length values. In addition, datasets of compressor stations, LNG terminals, storage, production sides, gas power plants, border points, and demand time series are provided. Finally, we have discussed data gaps and how they can potentially be closed.