/By AzerNews/

By Aynur Karimova

Azerbaijan's state energy giant SOCAR and Russian Gazprom Company will soon start swap transactions on Russian gas supplies to Azerbaijan, SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev told journalists on September 17.

“Gazprom has an excess of natural gas and therefore, we have decided to store these volumes in our gas storage facilities,” he said. “For our part, we have expanded the capacity of our gas storage facilities and the supply of Russian gas will become a kind of pilot project for testing their capabilities. As a result, SOCAR and Gazprom agreed to switch to the temporary swap scheme."

The supply of around 10 million cubic meters of Russian blue fuel per day will start next month.

“In total, we are talking about supplying around 2 billion cubic meters of gas per year,” he said.

In the future, this gas will be used for supplying Russia’s southern regions.

“We will check the peak capacity of our gas storage facilities in 2015 and 2016,” SOCAR president noted. “We will start to ensure the gas supply to Russia’s North Caucasus region from 2017.”

The sides have already reached a preliminary agreement and an expert group has been created to work on the technical details. The agreement will be signed in 10-15 days.

Earlier, Azerbaijan's methanol production plant AzMeCo Company signed an agreement on the purchase of up to 2 billion cubic meters of gas per year from Gazprom Export Company.

Currently, Gazprom has a contract (with the possibility of extension) on purchasing Azerbaijani gas signed October 14, 2009. The contract between SOCAR and Russia’s Gazprom allows for suspending and resuming gas supplies at any time.