Al-Awaj: Gas crisis comes to an end

Yemen Gas Company has a strategic stockpile of domestic gas exceeding 800,000 gas cylinders in case they should face any crisis or bottlenecks in the domestic market according to Najeeb al-Awaj, Deputy Executive Director of the Yemen Gas Company.

“The crisis witnessed by the domestic markets with the lack of domestic gas during the past week was the result of a technical malfunction in one of the Safer refineries,” he confirmed. “The company has maintained the refinery in order to re-produce domestic gas in a production capacity of an estimated 21,500 barrels per day,” he stated.

As this statement comes out and people still line up towards gas stations and shops to get gas cylinders.

Al-Awaj emphasized stabilization of the situation in the domestic market after the company provided large quantities of domestic gas throughout the governorates of the Republic according to necessary allocations to each.

“Yemen received, last Monday, across Sidewalks Port of Aden refineries a new shipment of domestic gas estimated 4,500 tons as a free donation from Saudi Arabia to Yemen to meet the growing needs of gas and face the crisis in local markets from time to time,” he affirmed.

That shipment is the fifth provided by Saudi Arabia to Yemen since the beginning of 2008 and comes in the framework of a previous agreement between the leaderships of the two fraternal countries to provide 30,000 tons of domestic gas to Yemen in order to limit the gas crisis and meet national requirements.

“Yemen has received till now about 20,000 tons of gas with the remaining quantity to arrive in the coming period,” he clarified.

Al-Awaj pointed out that the Gas Company developed a new mechanism for the distribution of domestic gas rule to ensure its presence in different markets of the Republic governorates so that the needs of the local market during the Holy month of Ramadan are met. “Yemen currently produces gas from Safer refinery at around 1800 tons of gas per day and 300 tons per day at Aden refineries to meet domestic gas market needs,” he said.
 
He stressed the need for cooperation from all citizens and officials in the fight against monopolists and weak souls of some gas shops owners who work as agents of the company. Some of them have mobile carriers to sell gas in streets in order to increase profitability rather than selling directly to citizens by the official price that is YR 500 per cylinder.

The Yemen reserves of natural gas are currently estimated at about 18.2 trillion cubic feet. Seven local and global companies are preparing to launch larger economic projects in 2009 represented by exporting Yemeni liquefied gas, at a total cost of four billion dollars.  It is scheduled to begin exporting the first quantity of liquefied gas to U.S. and Korean markets in the first quarter of next year, 2009.

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