OREANDA-NEWS  The gas shortage in the Kamchatka Territory is 500 million cubic meters. m per year, said RBC Governor Vladimir Solodov. According to him, the region lacks its own reserves of raw materials, but supplies should begin in 2025-2026.

The Kamchatka Territory initially relied on gasification at the expense of its own deposits, but the assessment of their reserves was incorrect, the governor of the region Vladimir Solodov said in an interview with RBC.

"The transport infrastructure was built for more than 300 kilometers to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky from the field. Now Gazprom supplies less than a third of the declared planned volumes," he said. According to him, now the region's deficit is 500 million cubic meters of gas per year.

The region is forced to replace the remaining share of the necessary energy resources with fuel oil, which is "very expensive, not environmentally friendly, and not reliable," complains Solodov. According to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, 100 thousand tons of fuel oil were used there in 2020, and by the end of 2022 - 400 thousand tons.

The problem of expensive and non-environmentally friendly fuel is planned to be solved, starting from 2025-2026, by supplying liquefied natural gas (LNG) at a regulated price from a transshipment hub that NOVATEK is building in the region in order to overload raw materials from ice-class gas carriers into conventional LNG tankers and go to the markets of the Asia-Pacific region, the governor of the Kamchatka Territory notes. In September 2022, the co-owner and chairman of NOVATEK, Leonid Mikhelson, at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, announced his readiness to build infrastructure for the gasification of Kamchatka. But this will require an additional resource base, the businessman warned. Since then, no new gas fields have been reported to the company for these purposes. Solodov told RBC that NOVATEK is still ready to supply gas to Kamchatka and build a significant part of the gas distribution infrastructure on the peninsula. At the same time, he declined to comment on which deposits the peninsula will receive raw materials from.