The fact that Ukraine after a certain (short) period will be able to fully provide itself with its own gas and become, at least in this area, non-volatile, has been talked about for a long time.
In 2012, the then head of government, Mykola Azarov, spent 15 years on this task.
The draft renewed energy strategy assumed that by 2030 Ukrainian gas production would reach the level of 47 billion cubic meters.
The next year, in 2013, President Viktor Yanukovych shortened the terms and assured the investors he met with that the goal would be achieved by 2020 in cooperation with Shell and Chevron corporations.
The next head of government, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, indicated the same time threshold, but already in 2016.
Next year, Vladimir Groisman spoke about plans to completely abandon imports by 2020.
And there are also economic experts, thanks to whose efforts the topic pops up constantly in exactly the same form: five to ten years - and we will forever say goodbye to the reverse, and at the same time, like a bad dream, we will forget about Gazprom.
Well, Zelensky's team decided to pick up this completely tattered idea.
Prime Minister Denis Shmygal promised to achieve full gas self-sufficiency by 2025.
He sounded confident and calm.
"We are setting a deadline: 2025 - to fully cover Ukraine's gas needs," the head of government said during a press conference in Kiev on Thursday.
Gross gas production in Ukraine in 2020 amounted to 19.742 billion cubic meters (-4.4% to 2019).
As for consumption, at the beginning of January, the press service of the GTS operator company reported that in 2020 the country needed 30.9 billion cubic meters.
That is, now gas workers - both the state company Ukrgasvydobuvannya and private DTEK, Burisma, UNB, Smart Energy - produce two-thirds of the required volume.
In 2016, the government approved the 20/20 program for Ukrgasvydobuvannya, according to which the company was to reach 20.1 billion cubic meters by 2021.
in year.
But by 2019, production did not grow, but fell.
The new management at NJSC Naftogaz adjusted the numbers, and it turned out that the record production figures shown in 2018 were only on paper.
The old leadership was fraudulent.
Manipulations were needed to adjust the volumes to the notorious 20/20 program.
The head of the gas division of NJSC Naftogaz, Andriy Favorov, explained then the reduction in methane pumping by the fact that the Ukrainian subsoil was extremely depleted, squeezed out “like a lemon”.
As a result, the plan to achieve self-sufficiency in natural gas was recognized as a complete failure.
In 2019, the plans were buried or postponed until better times.
In December, speaking on the air of one of the TV channels, Prime Minister with a scooter Aleksey Goncharuk noted with bitterness that colossal funds have been invested in mining in recent years, but no growth has been observed.
This happened already under Vladimir Zelensky, and, presumably, he must remember something about the gas fiasco.
There are indeed explored reserves in Ukraine, although their estimates vary greatly.
In addition, they lie at a depth of three or more kilometers, which means that mining will be very expensive.
Andrey Favorov argued that, as of 2019, it is cheaper to import fuel than to pump it out of wells, given that in order to get to it, you need complex preliminary work, broken down into many steps.
But that's not the point at all.
Every year less and less competent people come to the management system in the country.
If no government has succeeded in realizing an ambitious task, then one can make a win-win bet that Zelensky's team will definitely not succeed, just as he does not get on with a single case for which he undertakes.
A week ago, the Ukraine 30: Infrastructure forum ended in Kiev.
There were about the same promises as for gas, but in connection with other spheres of the economy.
This year Ukraine will be seized by a construction fever of such proportions that the leading states of the planet could envy.
The plans include thousands of kilometers of new automobile roads and hundreds of kilometers of railways, a hundred reconstructed railway stations, high-speed passenger traffic, 16 new and reconstructed airports, the beginning of the construction of two giant ski resorts, dozens of technology parks, the creation of a state air carrier, and a mortgage shurum-burum.
This is an incomplete list of gifts for Ukrainians that they should receive by the end of this year.
Experts have already calculated that the program is impracticable, there is no such amount of money (we are talking about billions of dollars) in the budget.
But Zelenskiy is no stranger to withdrawing his promises.
The task is to at least slightly strengthen the fallen rating, and when Ukrainian citizens do not see anything of the declared, refer to careless officials.
And start promising again.
And in parallel, construction will be launched, some money (considerable by Ukrainian standards) will be withdrawn, and we can only guess what will go where.
But Ukrainian morals do not stubbornly change in the development of public funds.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.