ITAR-TASS, Russia

Thursday 5:52 PM GMT

 

YEREVAN April 4

Armenian Ministry of Energy Infrastructures and Natural Resources considers it expedient to switch to a five-year agreement on the price of gas with Gazprom instead of the practice of setting the price of gas annually, said the head of the ministry’s foreign relations department Tigran Melkonyan at a meeting of the intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation between the Russian Federation and Armenia on Wednesday.

  

YEREVAN, April 4. / TASS /. Armenian Ministry of Energy Infrastructures and Natural Resources considers it expedient to switch to a five-year agreement on the price of gas with Gazprom instead of the practice of setting the price of gas annually, said the head of the ministry’s foreign relations department Tigran Melkonyan at a meeting of the intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation between the Russian Federation and Armenia on Wednesday.

 

"It is extremely important to work on agreeing and signing an agreement on the pricing procedure for supplying natural gas to Armenia for at least five years, which will make it possible to have certainty in the tariff policy when setting gas prices," Melkonyan said.

 

Gazprom is the only supplier of gas to Armenian consumers. On January 1, 2019, the price of Russian gas for Armenia increased from $ 150 to $ 165 per thousand cubic meters. Then, the Armenian authorities have repeatedly said earlier that they were negotiating a gas price reduction with the Russian side. In 2018, Armenia received gas on the border with Russia at the price of $150 per 1,000 cubic meters, which had been lowered to that level from $165 per 1,000 in 2016. Meanwhile, the fuel price for consumers was $290.

 

Russian gas deliveries to the country stood at 1.87 billion cubic meters in 2016 and at 2 billion cubic meters in 2017.

 

Gazprom Armenia, a subsidiary of the Russian holding. The contract for supply of up to 2.5 bln cubic meters of natural gas is effective until the end of 2019.