Ukrainian state-owned oil and gas firm Naftogaz, aiming to cover the country’s needs with domestic production, has brought five new gas wells into operation, the company said on Thursday.

Ukraine has not imported natural gas directly from Russia since 2015, buying gas from the European Union instead and stepping up efforts to increase domestic production.

Naftogaz said the five wells would increase overall production by about 500,000 cubic meters per day.

It said that since the beginning of the year the company “had commissioned 58 new gas wells with a total average daily production rate of 5.3 million cubic metres of natural gas.”

The company traditionally has not disclosed the location of the wells, but most of Ukraine’s gas fields are in the Kharkiv and Poltava regions that have come under frequent missile fire since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

Naftogaz is Ukraine’s largest gas producer, with output of 12.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2022. It plans to increase output to 13.5 bcm in 2023 and to 14 bcm in 2014.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Pavel Polityuk,Editing by Mark Potter)