Ukraine's energy exchange UEEX plans to introduce trading products for gas held in underground storage facilities under the customs-free warehouse regime from late April.

UEEX has signed an agreement with state-owned storage operator Ukrtransgaz to allow non-Ukrainian firms with gas stored in Ukraine under the customs-free warehouse and short-haul programme to trade gas through the UEEX platform.

The exchange expects to launch the service — which is still under development — around the end of April. Some non-Ukrainian firms have already been accredited with the exchange, UEEX told Argus.

And UEEX will improve its existing gas storage product already available to resident firms with customs-cleared gas. Firms will be able to close a deal within three hours, which would previously have taken up to two days, the exchange said. Ukrtransgaz will act as guarantor of the supplier's gas and automatically transfer ownership of the gas to the buyer from the supplier within 30 minutes.

Traders told Argus that they often prefer to make direct contracts as it takes more than two days to complete a trade for gas held in storage facilities through the exchange.

UEEX's traded volumes already rose sharply in 2020, climbing to 2.51bn m³ from 387.5mn m³ in 2019 (see graph). The exchange launched day-ahead trading last month.