Serbian oil and gas producer NIS has started trial operation at two small gas-fired power plants located at the Banatsko Miloševo and Srpska Crnja gas fields.
The facilities have combined installed capacity of 5 MW and required investment of approximately €17 million. Expected annual electricity production is 40.5 GWh, equivalent to a capacity factor of about 92.5%. That unusually high utilisation assumption indicates that the units are intended to operate as continuous field-based generation rather than occasional peaking plants.
Annual output would be sufficient to cover the electricity consumption of close to 8,000 households, although NIS plans to use part of the production internally and sell the remainder to external customers.
The plants will consume gas that was previously not commercially utilised. Converting field gas into electricity can improve resource recovery and reduce flaring or other forms of disposal, while avoiding the cost of transporting small or technically difficult gas volumes into the wider network.
At approximately €3.4 million per MW, the investment cost is high compared with conventional large-scale gas generation. The economics therefore depend on the value of the recovered gas, avoided disposal costs, high plant utilisation and the ability to offset electricity purchases at NIS facilities.
The two units include modern monitoring and control equipment designed to meet current environmental requirements. Their small scale limits their effect on Serbia’s national generation balance, but they provide dispatchable local supply and reduce electricity demand from upstream operations.
NIS began developing small-scale field generation in 2013. It has since commissioned 22 power-generation and cogeneration units across Serbia, investing more than €28 million before the latest project. The programme connects operational efficiency with gradual decarbonisation, although the resulting electricity remains based on fossil gas.
The start of trial operation shifts attention to technical performance. Guaranteed heat rates, gas quality, emissions, availability and synchronisation with the distribution or transmission system will determine whether the plants achieve their forecast output.
For NIS, the investment is less a conventional independent power project than an upstream optimisation measure. It turns a low-value or stranded fuel stream into electricity while strengthening energy autonomy at two producing fields.
