Natural gas has become even more accessible for household, business and public sector customers due to the increasing number of natural gas consumers and network development occurring as a result thereof. Lietuvos Dujos, the company managing natural gas distribution pipelines, in August received as many as 60 percent more applications for connecting to gas pipelines compared to the same period of last year. A total of 3.2 thousand applications was received during eight months of the year. The number of new customers connected to the gas network exceeded the indicators of the previous year by 18 percent: during the period from January to August, 2.1 thousand new customers were connected compared to 1.7 thousand new customers during the same period of last year.
Increasing number of natural gas customers has encouraged the company supervising gas pipeline infrastructure to make respective investments in network development. Calculations have been made that during eight months of this year more than 43.5 km of gas pipelines were constructed throughout the country, which is one fourth more pipelines compared to the same period of last year. Investments in the construction of new gas pipelines also were greater by one fourth compared to last year and totalled more than EUR 3.6 million.
According to the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Lietuvos Dujos, which is owned by the largest state owned energy group Lietuvos Energija, these investments create value not only for the existing natural gas customers, but also increase investment appeal of municipalities.
"We are happy about the growing number of our customers, however, in order to be able to continue providing high-quality services to the existing and future gas customers, we have to constantly modernize the current infrastructure, invest into the increase of the reliability and safety thereof as well as into the network development. That way we are increasing possibilities to use clean, very convenient and economically appealing fuel in municipalities connected to gas networks. Well-developed and maintained infrastructure has always been very important for potential investors, especially industrial and production companies", - said Liudas Liutkevičius, the company's CEO.
During eight months of this year, Lietuvos Dujos invested EUR 1.3 million in the works of reconstruction of gas pipelines, of which nearly half a million euros were funds allocated for the implementation of reliability and safety projects. With increasing natural gas distribution reliability in case of repairs of or damages to gas pipelines, currently the largest safety and reliability projects are implemented in Šiauliai (looping of Šiauliai city and Kairiai settlement), Kaunas (looping of Kaunas, Ringaudai and Noreikiškės settlements) and Vilnius (looping of Šilėnai and Kairėnai settlements in Vilnius and settlements of Lentvaris and Grigiškės).
"We have invested in gas pipeline looping projects, which allow avoiding disruptions in natural gas supply to customers in cases of various disruptions of pipelines. Upon the completion of all the works provided for this year, a safer and more reliable distribution of natural gas will be ensured for more than 6 300 customers" said L. Liutkevičius.
According to him, both the construction of new gas pipelines and investments in the reliability of the existing infrastructure expands possibilities to attract new investors in municipalities connected to gas networks, thus promoting the development of regions and at the same time creating better conditions for creating new jobs. In July of this year, an agreement was reached on the connection of one more city of Lithuania, namely, Tauragė to gas distribution pipelines. The first natural gas customer in this city will be the Lithuanian dairy company Vilkyškių Pieninė. Construction of gas pipelines to the major investor will open up the path for business development in Tauragė in 2016.
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