Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee Alexey Miller will open the Banatski Dvor underground gas storage and a new control room in the Pancevo Oil Refinery on Monday in the presence of Serbian President Boris Tadic.

The opening of the gas storage in northeast Serbia will also be attended by Director General of Srbijagas Dusan Bajatovic, while the Serbian president is scheduled to meet with Gazprom managers. The Banatski Dvor underground storage working gas capacity stands at 450 million cubic meters, while its maximum daily send-out capacity is 5 million cubic meters of gas.

The facility was put in commercial operation on October 1, and as a joint venture of Gazprom and Srbijagas it is important both for energy supply in Serbia and delivery of natural gas from Russia, considering the South Stream Gas Pipeline.

The cooperation between Gazprom and Srbijagas in construction of the Banatski Dvor is realized based on the agreement on cooperation between the oil and gas industries of Serbia and Russia signed on January 25, 2008.

The agreement on the Banatski Dvor joint venture between Gazprom Export, Gazprom Germania Gmbh and Srbijagas was signed in October 2009.

The Banatski Dvor joint venture, 51 percent of which is held by Gazprom and 49 percent by Srbijagas, is responsible for construction and operation of the underground storage, which was registered in February 2010. Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS), Serbia's state-owned oil company, announced that Tadic will attend Monday the opening of a new control room within the hydrocracking and hydrotreating sector in the Pancevo Oil Refinery, 15 kilometers northeast from Belgrade.

The modernization of the Pancevo refinery, amounting to about EUR 500 million, was launched in June 2009 and is to be completed by the end of 2012.

The hydrocracking and hydrotreating complex is the largest facility built as part of the refinery's modernization program and it is also part of the contract on sale of 51 percent of NIS shares, signed between the Serbian government and Gazprom Neft. The construction of the hydrocracking and hydrotreating complex will be supported with EUR 396 million.

The complex will increase the volume of treatment in the Pancevo refinery to 4.8 million tons of oil annually, which would meet the needs of the Serbian market and enable export to other Balkan countries.