MOSCOW (MRC) -- Gazprom is to pump USD13.5 billion into building a planned liquefied natural gas plant and associated infrastructure in the far east of Russia, siad Upstreamonline.
The Russian gas monopoly is to make the investment at the planned LNG plant near Vladivostok, Reuters cited a local governor as saying. The news wire also cited a Gazprom spokesperson as saying the investment figure, double the company’s previous figure of 220 billion rubles (USD6.67 billion today), includes the plant, port and associated infrastructure.
Gazprom plans to complete the first Vladivostok train by the end of 2018, with a throughput capacity of 5 million tonnes per annum of LNG.
A second train is due on line in 2020, doubling the available capacity. However, industry observers in Moscow warned that the project’s LNG may be very expensive to produce and the scheme may never break even, because its main source of gas is more than 3000 kilometres away at the Chayanda field in East Siberia.
As MRC wrote before, Russian Gazprom Neft beat analyst forecasts with a 3% year-on-year increase in third-quarter net profit. The oil-producing arm of state gas export monopoly Gazprom reported a net result of 57.5 billion roubles (USD1.75 billion), compared with 55.95 billion roubles a year earlier, while a Reuters poll of analysts had expected the company to earn 52.3 billion roubles in the latest quarter.
Gazprom Neft, is the fourth largest oil producer in Russia and ranked third according to refining throughput. It is a subsidiary of Gazprom, which owns about 96% of its shares. The company is registered and headquartered in St. Petersburg after central offices were relocated from Moscow in 2011.
MRC