Gas to Rural Areas

Sabit ORUDZHEV, USSR Minister of the Gas INDUSTRY, in an interview given to a Correspondent of the newspaper SELSKAYA ZHIZN

CORRESPONDENT: What problems are being tackled by the Soviet gas industry in the Ninth Five-Year Plan period?

ORUDZHEV: According to the decisions of the Party's 24th Congress, in the present five-year plan period the Soviet gas industry is to carry on with the building of a single countrywide gas supply system. Concrete tasks have been posed in the laying of gas pipelines and the securing of the. most effective gas flows...

Today the Soviet Union has a total length of almost 70,000 kilometres of gas pipelines. In 1973 alone, the third year of the current plan, the network grew by almost 20,000 kilometres. Large-diameter — 1,220 and 1,420 millimetre — pipes are employed in the building of new lines, which cross the taiga, deserts, swamps, powerful rivers and mountain ranges. The world's most northerly gas pipeline is now in operation in the Kola Peninsula and gas pipelines are being laid in Yakutia (Eastern Siberia).

The rapid expansion in natural gas extraction in recent years, the development of gas pipeline network and the appreciable rise in the output of liquefied gases make it possible to supply gas to increasing numbers of towns and rural areas.

A decade ago only about 1,000 cities and towns, 540 urban-type settlements and 356 rural centres had access to gas.

By July 1, 1973 gas had been supplied to 1,842 cities and towns and 2,255 townships. The number of flats using gas has topped the 32 million mark. 125 million people — half of the country s population — now employ this type of fuel.

Take, for instance, the Kirghiz Republic, the most southerly in Soviet Central Asia. All its cities, towns, townships, collective and state farms and more than 130 industrial enterprises have been provided with gas. Moreover, in this republic, with its extensive outlying pasturelands, about 20,000 felt tents and homes of shepherds have been supplied with gas.

CORRESPONDENT: How is the Soviet Union extending gas service to its rural areas in general?

ORUDZHEV- Nearly 56,000 Soviet villages are already getting gas. The number of gas-using rural flats has topped 8.2 million and is rapidly growing. More than 34 million rural inhabitants — over 33 per cent of the countryside population — now employ gas.

CORRESPONDENT: What benefits are offered by the use of gas in agricultural production?

ORUDZHEV: Quite a few. The collective and state farms have accumulated considerable experience which corroborates the economic effectiveness and technical expediency of the use of gas.
Many farms burn gas for heating livestock barns, thus cutting heating expenditures 1.7-1.8 times in comparison with other types of fuel. Gas heating sharply raises the output of livestock produce at reduced cost.

Gas is also used in the heating of unprotected plots, hothouses and in the enrichment of their atmosphere with carbon dioxide. This makes the upkeep of hothouses cheaper and their crop yield appreciably higher.

Gas heating of poultry farms and poultry factories raises the survival rate of fledgelings and improves their growth.

Gas is also finding increasingly expanded application in the protection of warmth-loving plants from freezing, the storage of farm produce, the heating of lorries and tractors in open parking areas in the cold season before their engines are started, and for other purposes.

CORRESPONDENT: What are the immediate prospects for the extension of the gas supply to homes in rural areas?

ORUDZHEV: In the present five-year plan period the proportion of gas-serviced homes in the countryside is to be raised to 40-50 percent. In other words, by the end of 1975 the number of gas-using centres of population in the country will have reached 65-70 thousand and at least 12.2 million rural homes will be using this cheap and convenient type of fuel.

Sputnik. May 1974

***