Poroshenko wants to obtain coal and gas from USA
WASHINGTON, 21 Feb — RIA Novosti. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said that he would like Ukraine to be awarded the coal and gas from the United States.
Poroshenko visited Washington on a working visit on Tuesday and met with U.S. President Donald trump and Vice-President Mike Pence.
“We talked about effective economic cooperation between Ukraine and the United States, that the coal from Pennsylvania was on the Ukrainian thermal power plants, and liquefied natural gas from Louisiana — in the Ukrainian gas transport system”, — said Poroshenko in an interview with Fox News.
Previously Ukrainian radicals have blocked the supply of coal from the Donbass, as a result, Ukraine from February 17 was introduced emergency measures in the energy sector. In particular, it provides for the continuation of measures to reduce the consumption of anthracite coal by thermal power plants and the use, if necessary, schedules of hourly outages and schedules outages and the introduction of special schedules of power units of nuclear power plants.
In 2016, the anthracite to Ukraine came from two countries — Russia and South Africa. In Russia bought 566,7 thousand tons of coal at 45.8 million dollars in South Africa — 366,6 thousand tons to 22.9 million dollars. Due to the ongoing trade blockade of Donbass in the first quarter of 2017 Russia remained the largest supplier of coal to Ukraine.
At the same time Ukraine is planning to replace the anthracite coal from the Donbass coal imports from South Africa. According to the Ministry of energy, the majority of Ukrainian power generating enterprises have begun preparations for import of anthracite from South Africa.