Rosneft to receive access to Sakhalin gas pipeline

As the Kommersant has got to know, President Vladimir Putin has intervened in the conflict between Gazprom and Rosneft over access to the TransSakhalin gas pipeline, an instructed a study of a transfer of the pipeline to the state. The legal basis for this is created by terms of the production sharing agreement for Sakhalin-2 the project, within which the gas pipeline was constructed. If the state receives it, Rosneft will be able to use the spare capacity of the pipeline to implement its LNG project on Sakhalin, which is competitive to Gazprom's. But Gazprom actually doesn’t resist this any more.

Vladimir Putin personally had to deal with the settlement of the conflict between Rosneft and Gazprom for the right to pump gas through the pipe, which belongs to the Sakhalin-2’s operator Sakhalin Energy (Gazprom has 50% of its shares). At the end of the previous week, he instructed the Government to work on the transfer of the infrastructure of projects, developed under the PSA (Sakhalin-2, Sakhalin-1 and the Kharyaginskoye field) to the Federal Property Management Agency, sources familiar with the situation told the Kommersant. According to them, in this case, Rosneft will be able to pump its gas via the Sakhalin pipe at a rate, calculated on the basis of the operating costs. Rosneft needs the access to the pipeline for the construction of an LNG plant in cooperation with ExxonMobil, but Gazprom refused this to the oil company. The monopoly is going to expandits LNG capacities of Sakhalin-2, but did not allow Rosneft to use the pipeline, it claimed not to have spare capacities. The company claimed for the transporting 8 billion cubic meters per year of the total volume of 18.6 billion cubic meters. The Kommersant’s sources say the Rosneft is ready to finance an increase in the number of compressor stations to increase the capacity of the pipeline; the cost of each of them is about $1 billion.