The Management Committee considered it reasonable to establish Gazprom’s test center for pipe equipment, materials and technologies.

The relevant subdivisions were tasked with preparing the materials related to the Company’s share in the charter capital of the test center and submitting them to the Board of Directors for approval.

Background:

Gas transmission is the most capital and energy intensive sector of Gazprom’s business. The equipment, technologies and materials, which comply with the most up-to-date requirements, are needed to ensure reliable and effective gas transmission. Promising oil and gas development projects in remote and hardly accessible regions impose ever more stringent requirements for reliability and durability of the equipment used, for its operational, technical and economic performance.

At every stage of new equipment and materials development and commissioning the most important tests are those that provide for defining reasonable requirements for technical facilities and converting these requirements into standards, as well as for checking whether the facility characteristics comply with the Company’s requirements and identifying whether it is possible to utilize the facilities with a desired efficiency level.

Taking into consideration the fact that the required test base was not available in Russia and there was a growing demand for gas transmission technologies, equipment and materials testing, in November 2007 Gazprom initiated creation of the corporate test center comprising a test range for full-scale testing of pipes.

The center will be basically targeted at:

- conducting tests as part of the research and development activities aimed at elaborating technical requirements for new equipment and technologies for gas pipeline systems;

- supporting tests as part of the investigations carried out to study the issues of gas pipeline systems operation;

- approbation of new materials, equipment and technologies to identify their practicality and suitability for utilization at Gazprom’s facilities during gas pipeline systems construction, repair and diagnostics;

- certification testing of the serial products supplied to the Company’s facilities;

- creating conditions for obtaining reliable data and new knowledge on properties of the facilities under investigation in order to specify optimal characteristics of products and production processes in the Company’s regulatory documents;

- ensuring suitable environment to elaborate the unified techniques and programs based on a single methodological basis for product testing for the benefit of Gazprom.