OREANDA-NEWS. February 15, 2008. Ukraine plans to establish a special fund for modernizing its gas transportation system (GTS), Ukraine's Fuel and Energy Minister Yuri Prodan said. According to him, now the government and the ministry develops a mechanism under which such a fund could work. Minister noted that the country needs about 2.5 billion euros to upgrade its GTS. Ukraine plans to organize a conference of potential donors for this project in September 2008. Prodan underlined that many international organizations support these plans.

Ukraine has a rather developed gas transportation system of 38,000km of gas pipelines including 14,000 with a pipes with diameter of 1020-1420mm, 73 compressing units (110 compressing stations) with total installed capacity of 5.4 thousand megawatt, and 13 underground gas storage facilities. System's carrying capacity is valued at 290 billion cubic meters of gas a year at the entrance and 178.5 billion cubic meters of gas a year at the exit. In 2006 an international audit of the system was completed, this audit confirmed the reliability of the system for no less than 5 years.