MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Gazprom expects to conclude pricing talks with China next year to start gas deliveries in 2013-14 and sees positive trends in the way China prices its energy imports, a Gazprom executive said on Monday.
"There is a major positive factor that China not only realized (the need to switch to market-based pricing), but they have started to contract natural gas in liquefied natural gas (LNG) contracts based on the prevailing market price," Gazprom Deputy Chief Executive Alexander Medvedev said.
"We expect the same to happen to pipeline gas pricing," he told the Reuters Russia Investment Summit.
Gazprom agreed to build two pipelines to China and supply up to 80 billion cubic meters when the links reach their peak capacity, but talks have been slow as the two sides struggle to agree on the price of future deliveries.
Asked whether the Chinese were tough negotiators, Medvedev said: "As tough as the members of the Olympic team".
But he said talks had accelerated after influential Deputy Russian Prime Minister Igor Sechin visited Beijing this year.
"There was a meeting in Moscow by the experts' group and the next meeting will be in China in October... We are moving in the same direction as each other. There is still a long way to go, but sometimes a long way can be covered very quickly."
(Reporting by Dmitry Zhdannikov; Editing by Jason Neely)
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