Gazprom Neft head Alexander Dyukov said the company will create an affiliate for building roads, including in regions where its facilities are located.

    “A decision has been taken to create a company that will be involved in road building using the experience, expertise and knowledge that we have already,” Dyukov told the Rossiya-24 television channel.

    Gazprom Neft, he said, would produce high-quality asphalt to be used in road construction.

    And the company would use its own technology in making the roadbed and intended to boost production of asphalt materials. Its projects would involve regional roads.

    In 2020, Gazprom Neft increased sales of asphalt by 10 % to 2.9 million tonnes, with production sold to 65 countries, including Western Europe. Production of asphalt for construction and roads climbed 11 % to 1.86 million tonnes.

    Dyukov said the company saw nothing unusual in this enterprise.

    “Only 15 years ago, if you were talking about bunkering or supplying aviation fuel, we were absent from both industries,” he told Rossiya-24. “And the same thing applied to lubricants for asphalt.”

    The company involved in asphalt production is called Gazpromneft-Bitumniye Materialy (Gazpromneft-Asphalt Materials) and it makes so-called modified asphalt – with special polymers added to last much longer and withstand lower, and even extreme, temperatures.

    Dmitry Orlov, the head of the new division, said this type of asphalt is 40 % costlier than standard asphalt, but can last twice as long as a road covering and also withstands greater loads.  The asphalt has already been used on federal roads, Including the M-1 motorway crossing Belarus, the M-11 Neva motorway linking Moscow and St Petersburg, the Sortavala road linking St Petersburg and Karelia, the Scandinavia road between St Petersburg and the Finnish border, the Sibir road from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk, the Chuyskiy Trakt through Novosibirsk region and Altai and others.