OREANDA-NEWS. June 24, 2009. Led by Alexander Ananenkov, Deputy Chairman of Gazprom Management Committee, the Company’s delegation continues its business trip to Saint Petersburg.

The delegation is composed of Oleg Aksyutin, Member of the Management Committee – Head of the Gas Transportation, Underground Storage and Utilization Department, Yaroslav Golko, Member of the Management Committee – Head of the Investment and Construction Department, Vasily Podyuk, Member of the Management Committee – Head of the Gas, Gas Condensate and Oil Production Department, as well as heads and specialists from Gazprom specialized subdivisions and subsidiary companies – Gazprom VNIIGAZ, VNIPIgazdobycha, Giprospetsgaz, Gazprom transgaz Saint Petersburg, Gazprom transgaz Ukhta, Gazprom transgaz Tchaikovsky, Gazprom export, Gazflot, Gazprom dobycha shelf, Shtokman Development AG etc.

Today the delegation visited the shipbuilding plants of Saint Petersburg – Severnaya Verf, Admiralty Shipyards and Baltiysky Zavod, which supply products for the needs of Gazprom.

A meeting took place at the Baltiysky Zavod premises dedicated to the prospects for expanding production and engineering capacities of Russian shipbuilders, which fulfill Gazprom’s orders. Taking part in the meeting were top managers from Russian leading shipbuilding companies – United Shipbuilding Corporation, Admiralty Shipyards, Amur Shipbuilding Plant, Baltiysky Zavod, Vyborg Shipbuilding Plant, Zvezdochka Shiprepairing Center, Severnoye Machine-Building Enterprise (Sevmash), Severnaya Verf, Krylov Shipbuilding Research Institute etc.

Addressing the meeting participants Alexander Ananenkov noted that Gazprom attached great significance to developing the Russian continental shelf with the total area of more than 5 million square km (25 per cent of the world ocean’s shelf) as well as to the prospects for LNG production and sea-borne transportation.

At the same time, the Company is striving to maximally engage the production capacities of domestic producers. Meanwhile, there is an obvious lack of both production and engineering capacities to construct modern marine equipment for offshore operations. It is, first of all, referred to drilling rigs and new-generation production platforms.

“Gazprom supports Russian shipbuilders’ initiative on creating new production capacities to manufacture drilling and production platforms, LNG carriers and individual blocks and modules of marine equipment.

Offshore field development up to 2020 will demand over ten drilling and production platforms, over 50 vessels and marine equipment of various types as well as at least 23 LNG carriers. We are pursuing the objective of placing the bulk of orders with domestic producers. In order to deliver this objective, the producers should comprehensively upgrade shipbuilding companies to satisfy the demands of Gazprom as a large customer in terms of quality and quantity,” underlined Alexander Ananenkov.

The meeting participants discussed the progress at the shipbuilding companies that fulfill Gazprom’s orders within the Russian shelf development process. It was pointed out that generally all the work was being done according to schedule.

Attention was also paid to the development prospects for domestic shipbuilding plants and sci-tech centers with regard to maximal utilization of their production and engineering capacities when implementing Gazprom’s orders.

Special emphasis was put on fact that the issue of replacing high-tech foreign spare parts by their domestic analogues was especially acute for Russia nowadays.

“It is necessary to adopt a state import substitution program that would embrace not only the shipbuilding, but the engine, machine, oil and gas equipment sectors as well. This program should encourage Russian producers to be active in equipment upgrade, certification, adoption and development of advanced technologies,” stated Alexander Ananenkov while summarizing the meeting results.