NIS begins trial run of two 5 MW gas plants in Banat
The Banatsko Milosevo and Srpska Crnja plants add five megawatts and 40.5 GWh a year, enough for close to 8,000 households. NIS put roughly two billion dinars into the two gas power plants.
Naftna industrija Srbije (NIS) has started trial operation of two small gas power plants in Banat, with a combined installed capacity of five megawatts. The units sit on the Banatsko Milosevo and Srpska Crnja gas fields, and the company put in roughly two billion dinars (about 17 million euros).
The Banatsko Milosevo plant is designed for 21 GWh a year, Srpska Crnja for 19.5 GWh. Together that is 40.5 GWh, enough to cover the consumption of close to 8,000 average households, or a little over 5,000 kilowatt-hours per household per year.
Both plants burn gas that had no commercial route to market. Instead of staying in the ground or being vented, that gas now feeds an engine and comes out as electricity. NIS says the arrangement also cuts the company’s air emissions.
Grigorije Tesanovic, project management manager at NIS, framed the decision this way:
By putting the new facilities into operation, we further confirm our commitment to the rational use of domestic energy resources, as well as to the modernisation of energy infrastructure.
The comment came in the company’s own statement, alongside the capacity, output and cost figures.
What five megawatts actually buys
Five megawatts running flat out for a full year would deliver 43.8 GWh. The designed 40.5 GWh implies a utilisation rate of roughly 92%, which is baseload territory rather than the duty cycle of a standby generator.
There is a reason for that. The fuel is already on site and does not have to be bought on the market, so there is little sense in letting the engines idle. Unlike wind or solar, output here does not track the weather and feeds the grid at a steady rate through the year.
Why does NIS build power plants on its own fields?
The program dates back to 2013. NIS has so far commissioned 22 generation and cogeneration modules across Serbia, with total spending in that segment above 28 million euros. The arithmetic is the same at every field:
- gas that is not worth transporting gets burned where it was produced
- the electricity first covers the field’s own consumption
- part of the bill for pumps, compressors and field heating disappears
So the payoff is not only in kilowatt-hours sold. Oil and gas fields are energy hungry, and every megawatt generated on site removes a line from the invoice the company would otherwise pay its distributor.
Two billion dinars against 28 million euros
This is where the numbers say more than the press release. The two new plants cost around 17 million euros, which works out at roughly 400 million dinars per installed megawatt, or about 3.4 million euros per megawatt.
What the earlier 22 modules cost per megawatt cannot be read from the statement, because NIS has not published their combined capacity or how the 28 million euros splits across years and sites. It is also unclear whether the two new plants are already inside that total or sit on top of it. Until that breakdown exists, the 2013 program and this year’s investment cannot be compared on price, however public both headline figures are.
Trial operation is not commercial operation
During a trial run the operator checks engine behaviour under load, gas quality, grid synchronisation and the response of protection systems. Regular commercial operation follows only after that, and NIS has not given a date for the switch.
For Serbia’s power system, 40.5 GWh a year is a small line item. For NIS it is a cost turned into revenue, and the thirteenth year of a program the company has been running quietly, field by field.
