Ukraine has begun to prepare for the complete loss of Russian gas transit
A stop to the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine is looking increasingly real, writes Kommersant.
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The publication indicates that the board of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine refused to purchase equipment worth $156 million for the modernization of three compressor stations (CS) in Central Ukraine. The company explained that “taking into account the agreement between Russia and Turkey on the implementation of the Turkish Stream project, which is designed to replace the transit of Russian gas to Turkey through the territory of Ukraine, such an investment is inappropriate.”
These three stations, in which Ukraine refuses to invest, serve the Kremenchug-Ananyev gas pipeline (and its continuation Ananyev-Izmail), which is the main transit route for Russian gas through Ukraine along the southern corridor, the publication reports.
“Gazprom itself is actually curtailing another transit route through Ukraine,” Kommersant emphasizes. – The monopoly promises to liquidate part of its gas pipelines in the central transit corridor Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod, through which the main flow of Russian gas to the EU passes through Ukraine. Back in the summer, the head of Gazprom, Alexey Miller, said that by 2020 the company was going to eliminate 4,3 thousand km of gas pipelines and 3 GW of compressor stations, since transit volumes would be transferred to the northern route into the future Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
By 2020, Gazprom wants to reduce transit through Ukraine to 10-15 billion cubic meters per year (compared to 67 billion cubic meters in 2015 and, as expected, approximately 80 billion cubic meters this year). In other words, we are talking about about 7 billion cubic meters in the central corridor for southern Poland, Hungary, Moldova and possibly Romania, and about another 7 billion cubic meters for Bulgaria, Greece and Macedonia.”
The implementation of these plans means the death of the gas transportation system, which was built with the expectation of receiving up to 288 billion cubic meters of gas per year from the Russian Federation, the newspaper writes.
“The world’s most powerful transit gas system will apparently go to scrap metal, since the gas producer and the transit country were unable to reach an agreement,” one of the industry’s interlocutors told the publication.
In addition, it is noted that for Ukraine, in addition to the loss of about two billion dollars in transit revenue, the situation will result in a lot of technological and economic problems, since the use of a reverse scheme for Ukraine to receive gas from the EU will become difficult for the west of the country and almost impossible for the east.
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