SciGRID_gas - Data Model of the European Gas Transport Network

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 are still missing, especially for the gas infrastructure. In this contribution, we present our approach for developing an opensource model of the gas transport network in Europe. Various freely available data sources were used to collect gas transport data. The datasets from multiple sources were merged, and further, statistical methods were used to generate missing data.As a result, we successfully created a gas transport network model only using open-source data. The SciGRID_gas model contains 206,000 km of pipeline data which is roughly in accordance to former estimations. In addition, datasets of compressor stations, LNG terminals, storages, production sites, gas power plants, border points, and demand time series are provided. Finally, we have discussed data gaps and how they can potentially be closed.