Last time Gasprom exported its gas to Azerbaijan on December 31, 2006.
Azerbaijan possesses sufficient volume of gas to satisfy its own needs, Nizameddin Guliyev, press officer of State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), told Trend while commenting on the information about shortage of gas in the republic and its possible import from Russia, which was earlier released by some media.
He said this information is not true to the facts. Guliyev said in addition to delivery of gas to the local market of the country, Azerbaijan continues exporting has within the framework of the contracts concluded earlier.
SOCAR press officer said that during the meeting at the International Economic Forum in Saint Petersburg Rovnag Abdullayev, SOCAR President, and Aleksei Miller, President of Gasprom, did not discuss gas deliveries to Azerbaijan to satisfy its local needs.
“During the meeting Miller was interested in SOCAR’s position to the gas deliveries to the methanol production plant of Azerbaijani AzMeCo company. SOCAR President said that considering that this is the Azerbaijani company, his attitude to this issue is positive and also expressed readiness to provide infrastructure of the company for the gas supplies from Russia to this plant,” Guliyev said.
Asked why Azerbaijani gas is not delivered to the enterprise, SOCAR press officer said that the entire gas extracted and to be extracted in Azerbaijani in the coming years is distributed and contracted for many years ahead.
AzMeCo is a private company and during design and construction its owners had to determine earlier where they are going to buy raw material, which has not been done. “The owners of the plant have, possibly, requested Gasprom to provide gas for the methanol production,” Guliyev said.
Caspian Barrel reminded that AzMeCo plant was launched in November 2013. However, in the first half of May SOCAR has stopped gas supplies to this plant. Gas is the only source for methanol production. After a while one of the plant owners – Nizami Piriyev – has been arrested by the law enforcement agencies on the case of credit of the International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA). IBA’s credit worth $300million has been used for construction of the plant. Piriyev has been release after repayment of debt to the bank, but the plant still stands idle, because the issue of gas supplies remained unsolved. According to the preliminary information, at present AzMeCo’s need in natural gas is about 200 million cub.m. a year, but it could increase up to 600-700 million cub.m. when the production capacities are increased.
The most interesting moment in this issue is not Russian gas deliveries to the Azerbaijani plant, but the price of gas offered by Gasprom. It is also interesting that the gas volume is rather small.
