During yesterday’s working meeting between Sergey Kogogin, General Director of KAMAZ, and Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee, an Agreement of Cooperation was signed.
Under the document, KAMAZ will develop natural gas-fueled intercity bus and off-road vehicle models for Gazprom.
The buses are planned to be used on public roads for the transportation of employees to the working places that are located considerably away from the available public transport infrastructure. The off-road vehicles are planned to be used as multipurpose machinery to tackle various tasks related to the operating activities in hard-to-reach locations. The parties will elaborate the technical solutions with regard to the design, structural components and configurations of the new models and perform the testing of the prototypes.
In the course of the meeting, the parties discussed the progress and prospects of their cooperation aimed at developing the natural gas vehicle market in Russia.
It was noted that KAMAZ, at the initiative of Gazprom, has launched the batch production of a wide range of natural gas-powered vehicles and machinery. Today, the automobile plant produces about 130 models of such motor vehicles, which makes over a half of the entire range of gas-powered vehicles currently offered by Russian manufacturers. Since 2014, Gazprom has been systematically purchasing the KAMAZ gas-powered vehicles (inter alia, drop side trucks, semi-trailer trucks and dump trucks) to update the vehicle fleets of the Company's subsidiaries.
The parties pay particular attention to the manufacture of innovative gas-powered vehicle models. For instance, a batch of LNG-powered KAMAZ-5490 NEO freight trucks intended for the transportation of thermally-insulated containers with liquid helium was custom-made by KAMAZ for Gazprom.
In the autumn of 2022, Gazprom and KAMAZ signed the agreement for the supply of a new range of all-wheel drive models, namely, KAMAZ-6250 buses for shift personnel and KAMAZ-62501 mobile workshop trucks. Most of those vehicles will be natural gas-powered and adapted for operation in the Far North. The first batch of the buses for shift personnel is planned to be delivered to Gazprom this year.