Moscow and Beijing are to hold the next round of talks on Russian gas supplies to China by the end of October, Russian deputy energy minister Anatoli Yanovsky said Thursday on the sidelines of the 7th International Energy Week in Moscow.
Earlier in October, China's former national energy administrator Zhang Guobao said on the sidelines of a conference in Kazakhstan that the two countries were still "not close" to reaching an agreement on conditions for bringing Russian gas to China.
Separately, in early October Chinese sources told Platts that the gas price remains the key issue in the talks. Russia wants a price close to that paid by its European customers, while China is insisting on a lower price, similar to what it pays to Middle Eastern LNG suppliers, according to the sources.
In late September, following a meeting with Chinese officials and CNPC executives, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said the two sides had "taken a step forward" in their gas supply negotiations, providing no other details.
Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corp. signed a legally binding agreement on the supply of up to 30 billion cubic meters a year of Russian gas to China in September 2010.
At the time, both sides hoped to reach an agreement on the price by the middle of 2011, sign a commercial contract by July 2011 and begin deliveries in 2015.
Earlier this year, Gazprom said it had agreed on all aspects of the gas supplies with CNPC except the starting price for gas deliveries.
"We have agreed on the price formula, on the indexation mechanism, we have the binding agreement, so now we are only to determine the price at which the deliveries can begin," Gazprom Export CEO Alexander Medvedev said in June.
At the time, Medvedev said the two companies had also discussed the possibility of an advance payment for Russian gas deliveries.
"An advance payment is a way to bring down the delivery price and speed up gas deliveries," Medvedev said, adding that up until then no agreement on such a payment had been reached.
