Gazprom’s Regional Policy Commission held an ordinary meeting chaired by Alexander Ryazanov, the Commission’s Head and Deputy Chairman of Gazprom’s Management Committee.

The Commission heard a report on the work done by Gazprom’s Department of Marketing, Processing of Gas and Liquid Hydrocarbons and the Mezhregiongaz company in establishing the fundamentals to fix objective and economically substantiated gas consumption rates for the population residing in the various RF regions. The meeting emphasized that the existing gas consumption regulation system started hampering the gas market and gas supply sector development. Considerable deviations from gas consumption norms are observed in a string of Russian regions.

The Commission ordered Gazprom’s relevant departments to prepare proposals on improving the legislative conditions in the natural gas consumption control sector. The proposals are to be submitted for the RF Government’s consideration.

The issues being addressed should be included into cooperation agreements concluded between Gazprom and the RF regions.

The Commission also ordered Gazprom’s Administration’s outlets, Mezhregiongaz, Promgaz and Regiongazholding to more actively introduce local gas measurement technical facilities and to include those into Gazprom’s programs on gas deliveries.

Reference:

Gas deliveries to Russia’s population, carried out through Gazprom’s subsidiary Mezhregiongaz, are one of the Company’s crucial challenges. Natural gas supplies keep growing on a permanent basis. Gazprom provided the RF population with 45.1 bcm of gas in 2002 and 47.08 bcm, in 2003, to be, expectedly, increased to 48.04 bcm this year.

Gas deliveries to the population are the most difficult phase of Mezhregiongaz’s activities. The main factors causing this are as follow:

• wholesale gas prices (set by the RF Federal Energy Commission) applied to the population are about 32% lower than the wholesale gas pricing applied to the manufacturing sector;
• independent gas producers are not involved in rendering services to the population in the majority of Russian regions;
• given 20.1 million of individual gas consumers in Russia, only 2.49 million of these have gas measurement equipment;
• in a number of the RF regions there are serious deviations from the existing gas consumption standards. These norms happen to differ greatly in the neighboring regions located within the same climatic zone.

DIVISION OF RELATIONS WITH MASS MEDIA