Besides revising dates for the gas price increase, the budget of 2009 to 2011 will spell out additional actions to offset losses of the population from the hike in the tariff rates.
Photo: Alexander Miridonov
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Inflation to Halt Gas Reform
On apprehension of inflation growth, the government apparently attempts to slow down the surge in gas prices on domestic market. According to Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach, the government has revised the schedule of hiking regulated gas prices and shelved introduction of an even-yield method from 2011 to 2015. Judging by the previous estimate of the ministers, the equal yield in gas would have fueled the prices to roughly $200 to 250 per a 1,000 cu meters by 2011.
“Direct application of the equal-yield method would require hiking the gas tariff rates by 95 percent to 100 percent,” Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach announced yesterday, during the sitting of the government’s commission for social and labor relations control. “Instead, a compromise solution has been made. We will retain the net back, in essence extending the transition for a few years along with it. We will actually shift to it in 2014 to 2015,” Klepach explained.
Of interest is that neither the Economic Development Ministry nor Energy Ministry or Industry Ministry knew for sure yesterday what exact document was in question. “The proposals are aggressively discussed, but I don’t know whether they were approved,” one of the bureaucrats said. In Gazprom and NOVATEK, they said they knew nothing about those new rulings of the government.
In general, gas producers manifested no particular enthusiasm in respect of proposals. A top manager of Gazprom said off the record that the monopoly will stick to the government’s ruling of May 28, 2007, whereby the gas to industrial consumers will be sold at the price calculated in view of the equal yield starting from January 1, 2011. “The prolongation of dates for reaching the gas price level on domestic market may trigger decline in investments in geological exploration and production of gas,” people in NOVATEK forecasted.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of May 28, 2008
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