Azerbaijan postpones Russian gas purchase

State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) has not started Russian gas import yet, SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev said yesterday.

On September 11, 2015 Azerbaijani AzMeCo company signed a contract with Gasprom Export to deliver 2 billion cub.m. of Russian gas a year to Azerbaijan.

“The deliveries of natural gas by Gasprom Group will guarantee full loading of the Karadag methanol plant,” a source from the Russian company said.

The deliveries started on September 29 and they were suspended on October 20, 2015. The Azerbaijani company explained that the deliveries have become unprofitable.

Since October 2015 SOCAR and Gasprom planned the temporary Russian gas swap operations to fill Azerbaijani underground gas storages to supply Russia’s southern regions with gas in winter.

“Gas is not imported yet. At present we have been negotiating the technical details of the swap contract and maximum volume of gas to be pumped into the underground gas storages,” explained Abdullayev.

The new contract envisages that at the first stage 10 million cub.m. of gas a day will be delivered from Russia to Azerbaijan and later on the volume will grow up to 2 billion cub.m. of gas a year.

“By pumping maximum gas volume, we would like to test capacity of our gas storages. Capacity of the underground gas storages have been initially increased up to 3.5 billion cub.m. and then up to 6 billion cub.m. But after the upgrade the gas storages have not been tested, so we would like to do that,” Abdullayev added.—0—