ASTANA. Aug 7 (Interfax) – Ukraine is currently assessing commercial offers from Kazakh coal producers in terms of prospective coal shipments, the press service of Kazakhstan’s energy ministry told Interfax.
“Should the Ukrainian coal consumers make a decision to go ahead, shipments of coal from Kazakhstan to Ukraine would be carried out under contracts signed by economic agents of two countries. Such contracts are to stipulate certain volumes of shipments, [conditions of] transportation, as well as liabilities of two parties with regard to their execution of the contract,” the press service said.
“Given the potential for increasing coal production as well as capacities of our coal producers, Kazakhstan is in a position to offer Ukraine considerable volumes of coal shipments,” the letter of the press service sent in reply to an Interfax query said.
Kazakhstan’s energy ministry said that today, coal concentrate is only shipped to Ukraine by the coal department of ArcelorMittal Temirtau, AO, delivering it to its own Ukrainian plant, at a level of 700-750,000 tonnes annually. The coal concentrate is a product of such processing of extracted coal as designed for coke production.
It was reported that an agreement about Kazakh coal shipments to Ukraine was reached during Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s visit to Ukraine in December 2014. The issue of unrestricted coal shipments from Russia to Ukraine was expected to be solved during the summer period.
Earlier, Nikolai Radostovets, Director of the Republican Association of Extraction and Mining and Metallurgical Enterprises of Kazakhstan, said in an interview with Interfax that “the Government will have to make efforts for the heating season in 2015-2016 to be successful for Kazakhstan, in terms of coal shipments to Ukraine.”
