Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee, and Sergey Kogogin, Director General of KAMAZ, had a meeting to discuss the progress and prospects of their cooperation aimed at developing the natural gas vehicle market in Russia.
In the course of the meeting, Miller and Kogogin signed an agreement of cooperation, under which KAMAZ will develop natural gas intercity bus and off-road vehicle models for Gazprom. The buses are planned to be used 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 addition, it was noted that KAMAZ, at the initiative of Gazprom, has launched the batch production of a wide range of natural gas cars and machinery. Today, the plant produces about 130 models of such vehicles, which makes over a half of the entire range of NGVs currently offered by Russian manufacturers. Since 2014, Gazprom has been systematically purchasing the KAMAZ natural gas vehicles (including 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 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.
Source: Gazprom
