MOSCOW, April 7 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova - The prospect of importing American gas to Ukraine and Europe remains unclear as the US has no available export facilities, believes Ildar Davletshin, Renaissance Capital's leading oil and gas analyst.
"The immediate prospects for US gas in Europe remain unclear given the lack of available export facilities in the US," Davletshin told RIA Novosti.
"Moreover, shale gas has played a pivotal role in boosting the competiveness of US industry over Europe's, and one could expect a strong lobby from the US domestic economy to keep most of this gas inside the US," he added.
In an interview Saturday with the Rossiya 24 TV channel, Gazprom spokesperson Sergey Kupriyanov affirmed American gas cannot become an alternative to Russian fuel in Ukraine in the foreseeable future due to the lack of export facilities.
Kupriyanov also dismissed Ukrainian authorities' claims about importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US as "political populism," adding that they have no effect on Gazprom's contract prices for the country.
"Even if some US gas lands in Europe in 2016-2017, Ukraine would need to resolve infrastructure issues which currently prevent it from importing significant volumes from the EU, and especially shipping those volumes to the eastern part of the country," Davletshin told RIA Novosti.
Ukraine's interim Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk said last Wednesday that the country was looking for ways to start reversing gas flows currently being exported to Slovakia.
On Saturday, he added that Ukraine might receive up to 20 billion cubic meters of reverse gas from Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. According to Kiev's official calculations, such gas would cost $100-150 less than the Russian equivalent. Yatsenyuk also stated that European gas for Ukraine may cost around $350 per cubic meter.
As of April 1, after Kiev failed to meet its debt repayments, Russian gas prices for Ukraine reached $385 per thousand cubic meters, a 44 percent increase. And at the beginning of April, Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller ended the $100 discount Kiev enjoyed under the 2010 Kharkov Agreement, raising the price to $485 per thousand cubic meters.
Under the April 30, 2010 Kharkov Agreement, Russia provided Ukraine a $100 gas discount on the condition that Russia's Black Sea Fleet would stay in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea and Sevastopol joined Russia last month and President Vladimir Putin announced the end to the Black Sea basing deal as Sevastopol is now under Russian jurisdiction.
