Prague - Karel Komarek, owner of the KKCG investment group, gave the green light to his MND oil company's long-planned investment in the Czech Republic's Hodonin district. The company will start the construction of an underground gas storage facility in Damborice worth CZK 2.5 billion (almost EUR 100 million). One half of the financing will by provided by Russian state-run gas company Gazprom.
Komarek and Gazprom Deputy Chairman Alexandr Medvedev signed the contract on Wednesday 20 March in Prague. "Construction will start this year, it will start operation in the middle of 2016," said Komarek's spokesman Daniel Plovajko. The gas storage unit, designed to have capacity of 448 million cubic meters of gas, will be one of the biggest in the Czech Republic, and the Russian state company will use it to store its gas.
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"Expanding our underground storage capacity is key to achieving security for our supplies," said Medvedev.
The project has been planned since 2008. Since then, KKCG has been increasing its cooperation with the Russian gas giant. KKCG is a minority shareholder in Gazprom's subsidiary in the Czech Republic, Gazprom Vemex. The Czech investment group also sponsors the KHL hockey league, a marketing project of Gazprom.
MND already owns two gas storage units in Uhrice. The older on has capacity of 180 million cubic meters of gas, the newer one - completed last year for approximately one billion korunas - has capacity of 100 million cubic meters.
SPP Bohemia, which previously co-owned KKCG, operates two gas storage facilities in Southern Moravia's Dolni Bojanovice. Their capacity is 567 million cubic meters and they are used by Slovakia's SPP gas company.
RWE Gas storage, a subsidiary of RWE Transgas, operates several gas storage units in the Czech Republic, and has been recently expanding their capacity.
The Ceska Energie group, owned by Ladislav Drab, Eduard Palka and Marek Cerny, announced three years ago the construction of a CZK 9 billion gas storage facility. So far, only minor preparation works have been done though. Experts doubt that the group, a minor gas importer in the Czech Republic, has enough financial power to complete such an ambitious energy project.
The Czech government welcomes the expansion of Czech gas storage units, because it increases the country's energy security. This issue has been very important in Europe since the gas crisis from January 2009, when Russian gas supplies for Europe stopped for three weeks.
