Internal Gazprom disagreement on Shtokman start-up
Deputy Chairman in Gazprom Valery Golubev rejects the company’s Deputy Chief’s statement that start-up at the giant Shotkamn gas field in the Barents Sea can be postponed beyond 2014.
As BarentsObserver reported, Gazprom’s Deputy Chief Aleksandr Medvedev on Monday said that the development of the Shtokman field might be pushed back beyond 2014 if gas demand in Europe does not recover fast enough.
Yesterday the company’s Deputy Chairman in Gazprom Valery Golubev stated that Gazprom and its partners StatoilHydro and Total have no plans to postpone the project, news agency RIA Novosti reports.
- We are highly interested in carrying out the project on time. Work is going as planned on all directions, he said.
However, Golubev admitted that the timetable can be altered if the state of the market becomes very unfavourable: - The only thing that can have any impact is if the gas prices fall so much that the raw material becomes unprofitable. Then we will have to slow down, he added.
Two weeks ago Golubev told reporters in Moscow that there are neither technical, financial, organizational, nor legal reasons why the Shtokman project should be postponed, as reported by BarentsObserver.
