Energy Ministry has no accurate data on how much gas stored in underground facilities – Vitrenko

Ukrainian Acting Energy Minister Yuriy Vitrenko says the ministry has no accurate information on how much gas is stored in the underground storage facilities (USFs) of National Joint-Stock Company Naftogaz of Ukraine.

He made the comment during an interview with RFE/RL's Ukrainian bureau on February 14.

Read alsoUkraine accelerates use of gas amid frosts: Stocks shrink by 3% over week"Just general figures. Such non-transparency means that the public is unaware of how much gas in Naftogaz's USFs. Moreover, there are also two regimes, that is customs warehousing and non-customs warehousing. And this information is unavailable there. What is more, I'll even reveal a secret: when I asked my employees about this as I had to submit relevant documents to the Cabinet of Ministers, they said that Naftogaz did not provide such data even to the Energy Ministry," he said.

Vitrenko expressed the hope that the situation would improve in the near future.

"We keep Naftogaz in state ownership so that it could focus on sectors where there are market failures or it doesn't work effectively, so that Naftogaz could perform other functions, for example, ensure security of gas supplies. Also, we need to see, for example, how much gas is stored in Naftogaz's USFs. We even need to see the cost of this gas in such facilities. Because there is a lot of speculation in this regard, that is, in summer, Naftogaz allegedly bought and pumped gas [into its USFs] at UAH 3 [US$0.11], and now it sells gas at UAH 7 [US$0.25]. I know this is not the case. But I cannot prove this with figures, for example, and this is wrong," he added.

Background

In early January, Naftogaz's press service reported a record high volume of natural gas accumulated in the country's USFs in the past decade, that is 28.3 billion cubic meters.