Haidach gas storage, Natural gas storage in Straßwalchen, Austria

Haidach is a natural gas storage facility located beneath the municipality of Straßwalchen in the state of Salzburg. The reserves rest inside a geological formation far below ground, managed from a surface control facility that oversees injection and withdrawal operations.

A natural gas deposit was discovered in the late 1990s and later converted into a storage facility after its extraction. Operations began in the mid-2000s under a consortium of European energy providers.

The name Haidach comes from the hamlet above the reservoir in the municipality of Straßwalchen. Since 2022 the facility has been a test case in Austrian energy policy: a law passed that June lets the regulator E-Control reassign booked but unused capacity, and Gazprom's share was handed to RAG Austria. The site supplies the chemical triangle of southeastern Bavaria.

The site lies in flat pre-Alpine terrain east of Salzburg and is marked by surface facilities with pipelines. Connections run through Haiming to the German border, where gas continues into the central European network.

The reservoir is a porous sandstone formation, not a system of natural cavities: it was a gas field holding 4.3 bcm of gas in place when RAG found it in 1997, and was converted to storage after depletion. Its rock is partly over 100 metres thick and extends across 17.5 square kilometres.