Kazakhstan has not received proposals from Uzbekistan and Russia regarding a tripartite gas union. This was reported by Kazakh media on Monday citing the official representative of the Kazakh Ministry of Energy Shyngys Ilyasov.
“The initiative to form tripartite gas union between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Russia in November 2022 was announced by the Russian Federation. At the same time, there have been no official proposals from either the Uzbek or Russian authorities,” he said.
Ilyasov added that cooperation in the gas sector with these countries is based solely in a bilateral format on the basis of mutually beneficial partnerships.
Considering that Kazakhstan’s gas transmission system has free capacities for the transit of Russian gas towards Uzbekistan, the Kazakh government and Russia’s Gazprom previously signed an action plan to prepare the Central Asia-Center gas pipeline to transport Russian gas to Uzbekistan, he said.
“Today, work is underway on the technical preparation of the Kazakh section of the Central Asia-Center gas pipeline for transporting Russian gas through Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan, which is scheduled to be completed on October 1,” added an official representative of the Ministry of Energy.
That is, Ilyasov specified, from October 1, Kazakhstan will launch transporting Russian gas to Uzbekistan.
Earlier, Deputy chief of Turkmengas Myrad Archaev expressed concern about Russia’s statement about the interest of other countries in the “gas alliance”, which now includes Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. According to him, this affects the interests of Turkmenistan, which exports gas to China.
Myrad Archaev fears that the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline can be used to supply gas from other countries to China.