BAKU, Azerbaijan, Oct. 7
By Klavdiya Romakayeva - Trend:
Gazprom has stopped purchasing natural gas in Uzbekistan starting from the beginning of 2020 (at least until the end of June), Trend reports referring to the memorandum of a new issue of Gazprom's Eurobonds, based on data for 1H2020.
In 2019, Gazprom bought 7.6 billion cubic meters of gas in Uzbekistan (including 3.3 billion cubic meters of gas in 1H2019), 6.7 billion cubic meters in 2018 and 7.2 billion cubic meter in 2017.
In the first half of 2020, Gazprom increased its gas purchases in Turkmenistan from 1.2 billion cubic meters for the first six months of 2019 to 1.7 billion cubic meters.
Purchases in Kazakhstan decreased from 5.4 billion cubic meters up to 4.1 billion cubic meters.
In total for 1H2019, Gazprom's purchases of gas in Central Asia fell from 9.9 billion cubic meters to 5.8 billion cubic meters.
Earlier, Russian LUKOIL, working in Uzbekistan also announced a decrease in gas production in Uzbekistan following the results of 1Q2020. This happened due to a decrease in demand for Uzbek gas in China amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In June, the Russian company's production declined to about 40 percent of its design capacity, and in August it completely stopped production at one of the projects and stopped exporting gas from Uzbekistan to China.
“At the moment, the volume of daily production amounts about 20 percent of the design capacity, and the production under the Gissar project has been completely stopped,” LUKOIL said in its semi-annual IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) report.
It was possible to resume production at the project only in mid-September.
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