Kazakhs Launch Large Gas Process Plant
KazTransGas (KTG), owned by state-run KazMunaiGas, has started up a gas dehydration plant of 10bn m3/yr capacity, close to its Bozoi underground gas storage, the company announced December 6.
The new facility is intended to increase the reliability and safety of the 4bn m3 gas storage facility, and to supply dry gas to Kazakhstan’s pipeline system.
Injecting gas prior to dehydration at Bozoi damages the quality of gas in the underground storage facility, hence KTG’s decision to build this dehydration plant. Now dehydration has increased the rate at which gas can be withdrawn from Bozoi by 25% to 27mn m3/d.
Kazakhstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev said, after a ceremony to commission the new plant, that the country had long relied on gas imports from neighboring countries: “But this problem was solved after the construction of the main Beineu-Bozoi-Shymkent (BBS) gas pipeline and, now that we have completely provided gas to the country's domestic market, we can expand the horizons to gas exports."
Kazakhstan recently signed an agreement to increase gas export to China to 5bn m3/yr; last year the volume it exported to China was less than 0.5bn m3.
It also exported 12.7bn m3 gas to Russia in 2016. Recently, Gazprom said that gas purchase from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would increase to 20bn m3/yr in 2017 and 2018, but didn’t split out the volumes by source; however Uzbekistan exported 4.3bn m3 to Russia in 2016.
In 2016, Kazakhstan’s gross gas production (including re-injection and flaring) was 46.33bn m³. Kazakhstan never releases the amount of sales gas production, but BP estimated that it was 19.9bn m³ in 2016. According to the recent 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the ministry’s gross gas figures suggest that a lot is used in oil field reinjection. Kazakhstan flared 2.67bn m³ in 2016 according to World Bank data, while its CO2 emissions (including from coal) were 15.8 metric tons per capita. Last year KTG accepted loans from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) toward financing an upgrade of the Bozoi storage facility, reducing emissions, and building the BBS pipeline.