NJSC Naftogaz Ukrainy in response to criticism from Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman as for the failure of JSC Ukrgazvydobuvannia (UGV) to boost gas production to 20 billion cubic meters in 2020, has called on the government and local authorities to join forces to increase Ukrainian gas production.

In its press release, Naftogaz recalled that the Cabinet's concept for the development of the country's gas production industry, which was approved in 2016, called the "large-scale geological prospecting of new fields" as its number one task.

At the same time, the implementation of by UGV of this part of the program was blocked due to the actions of third parties who are outside Naftogaz's control. In particular, UGV planned to get 80 new licenses in 2016-2018 for active exploration and drilling in new areas, filed over 170 sets of documents, but received only 17 approvals. For example, in the past three years, there were over 60 rejected requests in one of the key regions – Poltava region. Not a single application filed for subsoil development has been approved there.

In total, in 2017, the company received only four licenses, and there was only one in 2018 after it won a tender. This position of local authorities led to the situation when the company failed to produce another 1 billion cubic meters of natural gas.

Despite this, UGV in the past four years increased drilling volumes by 1.8 times (from 173,000 in 2015 to 313,000 meters in 2018), introduced and intensively developed a hydrofracking program (there were no hydrofracking operations in 2015, there were 16 in 2016, 101 in 2017, 173 in 2018), increased the number of coiled tubing operations from four to 1,400.

In addition, the company opened eight new fields, tripled the volume of 3D seismic operations, and for the first time since 2015, it has increased the resource base at existing fields by 38.6 billion cubic meters.

UGV is wholly owned by Naftogaz, it accounts for about for about 75% of the country's natural gas output.