Tender for gas storage facility construction in Georgia to be announced in 3 months

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The tender for engineering and construction works of the first underground gas storage facility in Georgia will be announced in 3 months, supposedly.

Report informs citing Caucasus Business week, Deputy Georgian Minister of Energy, Mariam Valishvili said. She added that a foreign consultant hired to prepare a tender plan: “We united engineering stage which is the first and very important phase along with choosing a construction company. We have a technical consultant, who said that it is necessary to conduct additional researches for geological structure along with technical-economic confirmation to calculate exact parameters for engineering works”, declared Valishvili.

Deputy Minister said that SOCAR is interested in the project but no discussions were held yet.

Notably, Georgia is the only country in the South Caucasus region, which has no underground gas storage facility, that creates serious problems to meet the country’s demand for natural gas as well for energy security of the country. The Georgian government has decided to build an underground gas storage facility in order to solve the problem. Technical project of the facility has been developed by French company “Geostock”. 210-280 million cubic meters of natural gas will be preserved in the facility, which will make 15% of natural gas consumed in Georgia.

The new storage facility will be built in the base of old southern gas dome in Samgori, Tbilisi.

A few months ago, Georgian Energy Minister Kakha Kaladze told reporters that construction of the facility will be launched by the end of 2017 and the works are planned to be completed in the end of 2019, early 2020.