OREANDA-NEWS. September 03, 2015. Blagoveshchensk hosted a working meeting between Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee and Alexander Kozlov, Acting Governor of the Amur Region.

The parties addressed the progress with the Agreement on Cooperation. Particularly, they discussed the execution of the Company’s strategic projects in the Region. The Power of Siberia section will be built here as well as the Amur Gas Processing Plant (GPP), which will become the biggest plant in Russia and one of the biggest ones in the world.

The emergence of these powerful facilities will speed up the socio-economic development of the Amur Region, inter alia, by means of creating new jobs. Thus, up to 15 thousand people will be engaged in the Amur GPP construction during the busiest period. It is expected that once the plant reaches its design capacity, about three thousand people will work there.

Presently, the Amur GPP is being designed as well as the Lensk – Svobodny – Blagoveshchensk section of the Power of Siberia gas pipeline; preliminary activities are in progress at the plant construction site.

The parties also looked into the issues of the Company’s involvement in building up the social and sports facilities in the Amur Region.

Background

Gazprom and the Amur Region Government have already made the Agreement on Cooperation, and the parties also have plans to sign an Agreement on Gasification.

The Amur Region is not supplied with pipeline gas. Presently, the level of local gasification with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) equals 33.9 per cent. LPG is supplied to consumers by Amurgaz (Gazprom holds a 25.49 per cent stake in the company). Pipeline gas will be available in the Amur Region due to the Power of Siberia construction. Gazprom has elaborated the General Scheme for Gas Supply to and Gasification of the Amur Region, and currently the document is being amended.

Power of Siberia is a gas transmission system intended for natural gas delivery from the Irkutsk and Yakutia gas production centers to the Russian Far East and China. The pipeline will cross three Russian constituent entities – the Irkutsk Region, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and the Amur Region – and in future will be connected to the Sakhalin – Khabarovsk – Vladivostok GTS.

Gazprom will construct the Amur Gas Processing Plant in the Amur Region to extract valuable components (helium and ethane, for instance) from natural gas. The plant design capacity will reach up to 49 billion cubic meters of gas a year.