Energy: gas production and experience

Oleksandr Katsuba came into gas as a financier, a finance graduate of Karazin University in Kharkiv. His first post in energy was a production unit of Ukrgasvydobuvannya in the Poltava region — where his own company works today.

Then came four years at board level of state companies: Chornomornaftogaz, where offshore production in the Black Sea more than doubled in that time, and Naftogaz of Ukraine, with a seat on the Ukrtransgaz supervisory board. It is a school private business does not give: the country’s gas balance, regulation, tariffs and the price of decisions at national scale.

In 2022, in the first months of the full-scale war, he founded Alpha Gas and did what others shied away from: he invested in deep drilling. In 2022–2024 the company put more than UAH 1.5 billion into exploration, wells and upgrades, ran 3D seismic over 332 km² and drilled wells down to 5,850 m.

One well was brought into operation in April 2022, 20 km from Myrhorod, then one of the hottest spots in the reports. After the strikes on gas infrastructure the company built concrete shelters, expanded its tanks and in 2023 reached more than 1 million m³ of gas a month.

Since 2014 Oleksandr Katsuba has been managing and developing Nadra-Geoinvest, a group among the country’s three largest private gas producers; in 2026 he officially became its co-owner. Together it is a portfolio across the Poltava, Luhansk and Lviv regions, with a bet on deep gas.

His assessment is sober: Ukraine barely importing gas is not a production success but the result of heavy industry standing still. Real energy independence is domestic gas that suffices once the plants run again.

For production to grow he names three conditions: return dormant licences to the state, protect gas facilities on a par with military ones and open the industry to deep-drilling technology. Beyond that, a flexible grid with nuclear — small modular reactors included — as the base, and gas, renewables and storage keeping the balance.