Business | Oil & Gas
Gazprom will invest $420b in gas industry by 2030 to meet demand
Russian gas monopoly Gazprom will invest $420 billion in the gas sector by 2030 to ensure enough supplies to the domestic market and exports, its chairman said in remarks published yesterday.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:25 July 6, 2007
Moscow: Russian gas monopoly Gazprom will invest $420 billion in the gas sector by 2030 to ensure enough supplies to the domestic market and exports, its chairman said in remarks published yesterday.
"It is an average of $18 billion per year. We have the money and it will be invested," Dmitry Medvedev told the Vedomosti daily in an interview.
Medvedev rebutted criticism that state-controlled Gazprom was investing too little in production and instead chasing after acquisitions - including taking control of the Sakhalin-2 and Kovykta gas projects previously run by Western oil majors.
He said that joint ventures and asset swap deals with foreign partners would help ensure that Gazprom, the world's largest gas company, can supply the market in full.
"Fears that there will be a deficit of gas on the Russian market are groundless," he said in an interview. "There is only one gas shortage - for those who want to buy it on the cheap."
Gazprom has said it was considering possible swap deals with a number of foreign companies, such as Germany's E.ON, BASF and Britain's BP Plc.
Medvedev, also Russia's first deputy prime minister, is an influential protege of President Vladimir Putin who has been widely tipped to run for election at next year's presidential election.
He played down suggestions that he had higher ambitions, saying he was satisfied with his current job.
Medvedev also forecast that Putin would express his support for a preferred successor at some point in the autumn of this year.
Gazprom, which supplies a quarter of Europe's gas needs, produced 556 billion cubic metres of natural gas last year and plans to raise output to 940 bcm by 2020.
It charges its Western European customers an average of $260 per 1,000 cubic metres of gas and has had a series of run-ins with neighbouring states like Ukraine and Belarus to push them to pay higher prices.
Domestic price caps are being gradually raised and will more than double to $125 per 1,000 cubic metres for industrial customers by 2011.
HUNGARY
Russian firm eyes 50% stake in Emfesz
Russian energy giant Gazprom is in talks to acquire 50 per cent of Hungary's biggest independent gas wholesaler, Emfesz, according to media reports, but the Hungarian wholesaler declined to confirm the information.
Russian daily Kommersant reported, and Hungarian dailies Vilaggazdasag and Nepszabadsag cited the report, that Gazprom was eyeing the firm, which plans to build Hungary's largest gas-fuelled power plant with a capacity of 2,400 megawatts.
"This is up to the owners (of Emfesz). It is not in our discretion," Emfesz press chief Borisz Sesztakov told Reuters when asked if Emfesz and Gazprom were in talks.
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