Gazprom supplying gas to Vladivostok in full
TOMSK/VLADIVOSTOK. Nov 20 (Interfax) - Gazprom Transgaz Tomsk has not imposed any restrictions on gas supply to the city of Vladivostok, the company's general director, Anatoly Popov, told Interfax.
The company earlier said its specialists were repairing a defect along the Sakhalin - Khabarovsk - Vladivostok gas pipeline, where a gas pressure control valve froze and that gas supply to Vladivostok had been temporarily halved, from 120,000 to 60,000 cubic meters per hour. Normal supplies were supposed to resume on Wednesday, the company said.
But Popov said "we haven't cut supplies by as much as a cubic meter." "It's just that there was the need, we warned that [restrictions] were possible, but it didn't happen in the end," he said, adding that Vladivostok was receiving between 90,000 and 120,000 cu m an hour.
Reports on November 19 said Gazprom had restricted gas supply to Far Eastern Generating Company's power plants from 80,000 to 50,000 cubic meters an hour because part of the Khabarovsk-Vladivostok gas pipeline (1,575 kilometers, alongside the Vladivostok gas distribution station) had frozen. Gas supply to Russky Island was been halted entirely. As a result, Far Eastern Generating Company was forced to convert a mini-combined heat and power plant to more expensive diesel fuel.
The $10-billion Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok gas pipeline is valued at around $10 billion and was commissioned in September 2011. The pipeline's operations are regularly interrupted because of hydrate plugs. Interruptions in the pipeline's supply forces power companies to transfer to more costly heating fuel. Far Eastern Generating Company is trying to win compensation for excess heating oil costs through the courts.
