Vucic: Serbia plans to raise imports of gas from Russia to 3 bcm/yr

BELGRADE, Nov 16 (PRIME) -- Serbia plans to increase natural gas purchases from Russia to 3 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said on Tuesday.

“To avoid wasting people’s money, we used 102 million cubic meters of gas, and now our reserves are at 161 million cubic meters at the Banatsky Dvor storage. We are spending what we have been saving at a terrible speed,” Vucic said.

It takes Serbia 1.8 million cubic meters of gas per day just to produce additional amounts of electricity in the winter, he said.

“We have to get over 3 billion cubic meters of gas (per year), but we must also have a flexible price. We have to build storage facilities so that we can buy 3 billion cubic meters and spend 3.5 billion, for example, over six years,” Vucic said, when asked about expectations from the upcoming talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Vucic said that he is going to Moscow to discuss solution to the gas crisis in Serbia with Putin on November 25.

Russia is Serbia’s only gas supplier now. The country used to import 2 bcm via the Ukrainian and the Hungarian routes of the Russian gas pipeline supplies. Now, Serbia imports gas via the Bulgarian segment of the TurkStream pipeline.

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