Gazprom prioritizes transport over production

摘要

The government in July approved a 15.8% cut in Gazprom's 2009 investment program, bringing it down to Rb775 billion ($23.7 billion). The reason was a drop in revenues, owing to falling gas demand and lower prices. While large, the reduction was less than that floated as possible in late June by Gazprom's chief financial officer Andrei Kruglov, who suggested the retrenchment could have been as much as 30%.rnCuts are likely to come in all segments of Gazprom's spending plans, although priorities have shifted in favor of transportation rather than production, as Kruglov said would be the case. Major infrastructure projects, such as the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline across the Baltic Sea, will not be revised. Nord Stream will export gas directly to Germany and to other European countries, bypassing Russia's traditional yet problematic transit countries in eastern Europe.