Gazprom said Tuesday that it expected to post a profit from sales in its domestic gas market this year, although the monopoly has failed to deliver on similar promises in the past.

“In 2009, Gazprom aims to get a profit from domestic gas sales,” the world’s biggest gas producer said in a statement issued after a board meeting.

It said the goal would be hard to achieve without more price hikes but added that it saw increasing sales on a local gas exchange at unregulated prices as one of the ways to boost income in Russia, where it sells more than half of its gas.

Russian gas prices are regulated by the government, which is struggling to fight off double-digit inflation and a budget deficit amid the severe economic slowdown.

In 2007 and 2008, Gazprom also said it wanted to post a profit in the domestic market, but it ultimately failed to do so.

The company, which generates more than 80 percent of its total revenues from foreign sales, usually does not disclose separately its losses from sales on the domestic market.

The average gas price for Russian consumers is seen at 1,895 rubles ($59) per 1,000 cubic meters in 2009, while Gazprom, which supplies a quarter of Europe’s gas, has said its export price for Europe will average at more than $280 this year.

Gazprom has said it needed a price of 2,707 rubles for local customers in order to operate successfully.

The government is planning to gradually increase local gas prices until 2011 to achieve a level of equal profitability of sales on both local and export markets.

Domestic gas prices will rise by up to 28 percent per year in 2009 and 2010, according to a government decision.

The plan was approved in 2006 after repeated complaints from Gazprom that it only made profits from exports and that it posted heavy losses at home.

But many analysts believe that such hikes are not sufficient for domestic prices to reach parity with export prices by 2011.

Gazprom’s largest local customers are power generation plants, which accounted for more than a third of its domestic sales in 2008.

Gazprom also said it may push back the development timeline for gas deliveries from the offshore Arctic Shtokman project because of falling demand.

“This timeline may be revised accordingly to reflect natural gas market conditions,” Gazprom said in a bond prospectus.

Shtokman Development is scheduled to make a final investment decision in March 2010 on plans beginning with pipeline deliveries in 2013. The venture plans to begin liquefied natural gas deliveries of as much as 7.5 million tons the next year, the prospectus said.

“Relatively inexpensive shale gas has significantly reduced the U.S. demand for LNG,” Mikhail Korchemkin, executive director with East European Gas Analysis, said Tuesday. “Shtokman is aimed to get a piece of the U.S. market, but there is no free space in it.”