The TAL pipeline stood still for five days. The outage was caused by a power line fault

The Transalpine Pipeline TAL, which — after the blockage of Druzhba — is the main and currently key route for oil into Czechia, was completely shut down for five days. The officially stated cause is technical — a damaged power pole near a pumping station in the Italian Alps. Intelligence services of several countries are examining the circumstances of the incident, which is standard procedure in the case of outages affecting critical infrastructure. There is no publicly available evidence of sabotage. Aktuálně.cz/ČTK ↗

The outage occurred around March 26 at the Paluzza pumping station (province of Udine) in the northern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, near the Austrian border. Paluzza is the last pumping station before crossing the Alpine massif — without it, the oil simply does not have sufficient pressure to cross the mountains. Transport was resumed after five days, once the Italian electricity grid operator Terna restored the power supply. Seznam Zprávy ↗

TAL Group spokesperson Paola Pasino confirmed to the Czech News Agency that Terna had asked them to disconnect the Paluzza station due to a damaged power pole. According to her, pipeline operation stopped as a result of the power outage and resumed once Terna restored the supply. Pasino did not further comment on the cause of the pole's damage. Aktuálně.cz/ČTK ↗

According to information obtained by ČTK, intelligence services of several countries are examining the circumstances of the damage to the power pole. The Czech Security Information Service (BIS) did not comment on the case. There is no publicly available evidence that this was a targeted attack. Aktuálně.cz/ČTK ↗

No mention of the incident could be found in major Italian, Austrian, or German media. On March 31, the Italian press agency ANSA published an interview with SIOT president Alessandro Gorla about the impact of the Hormuz crisis on deliveries via Trieste, but the TAL outage was not a topic. No press release about the incident was published on the official TAL Group website — the most recent statement dates from December 2025. ANSA ↗ TAL Group ↗

In December 2020, a very similar incident occurred on TAL. Massive snowfall damaged the electrical connection of a pumping station in Matrei in Austria's Tyrol, and the pipeline stood still for almost five days. At the time, TAL's general manager Alessio Lilli commented on the incident and confirmed that transport had resumed. The outage was reported by Austrian regional media as well as the German Handelsblatt. This time, the media response was significantly smaller, which may also be related to the broader news context — the ongoing Hormuz crisis and the war with Iran. Dolomitenstadt.at ↗ Handelsblatt ↗

The TAL (Transalpine Pipeline) is 753 kilometers long and runs from the Italian port of Trieste across the Alps to Austria's Tyrol and onward to Ingolstadt in Germany. It has been in operation since 1967, and its capacity exceeds 40 million tons of oil per year. The pipeline connects to Czechia via the IKL branch (Ingolstadt-Kralupy-Litvínov), through which oil flows to the refinery in Litvínov. MERO, the Czech operator of oil infrastructure, holds a 5% stake in TAL. The TAL Plus expansion, completed in April 2025, was meant to allow Czechia full independence from the Russian Druzhba pipeline. MERO ↗ S&P Global ↗

During the five-day outage, the Litvínov refinery was supplied exclusively from German storage facilities via the IKL pipeline. In response, Andrej Babiš's government approved a loan of 100,000 tons of oil from state material reserves to PKN Orlen. According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Czechia had strategic reserves for approximately 86 days, though a third of them had already been lent to refineries due to the earlier Druzhba outage. Seznam Zprávy ↗

The TAL outage should be viewed in the context of the growing vulnerability of European energy infrastructure. In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea were sabotaged. In January 2026, the left-wing group Vulkangruppe set fire to a high-voltage cable in Berlin's Lichterfelde district — the outage affected more than 40,000 households for four days. According to Euronews, Europe recorded at least 11 attacks on critical infrastructure in 2024. These incidents illustrate a broader trend, but they cannot be linked to the TAL outage, for which an official technical explanation exists. CNBC ↗ Euronews ↗

At the same time, the outage underscores the practical vulnerability of Central Europe. The Druzhba pipeline has been blocked since January 27 following a Russian drone attack on a pumping station near the city of Brody in western Ukraine. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil normally passes, has been effectively closed since early March following US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Slovakia has remained in a state of oil emergency since February 18. Czechia has resorted to capping distributors' margins and lowering the excise tax on diesel. EUobserver ↗ HN Online ↗

According to the official explanation, the damage to the power pole near the Paluzza station was a technical fault. The 2020 incident shows that similar outages do occur on TAL. The operator's response was minimal, and the incident did not receive significant coverage in foreign media.