LUKoil: Reserves Are Huge in Russia's Sector of Caspian
Combined Reports BAKU, Azerbaijan -- Reserves in Russia's sector of the Caspian Sea may total 4.5 billion tons (33 billion barrels) of oil equivalent, LUKoil, which controls almost all the fields there, said Wednesday.
LUKoil vice president Anatoly Novikov told an annual Azeri oil show in Baku that the firm had discovered a total of five offshore fields in the sector in recent years and planned to start producing by 2008.
LUKoil, which holds the world's biggest oil reserves among private oil majors after U.S. major ExxonMobil, has in the past delivered conflicting estimates of its Caspian fields.
The firm has said the majority of fields contained gas, which is very difficult to ship out from the land-locked sea due to limited market interest in neighboring states except Turkey.
LUKoil said in April its oil and gas reserves rose 4 percent in 2003 to 20.06 billion barrels of oil equivalent, or boe, mainly due to new discoveries and acquisitions in Siberia and the Far North. Exxon has 22 billion boe.
LUKoil, which pumps most of its oil in Western Siberia and the Arctic, is also developing oil fields in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran and Egypt, conducting a survey of a Colombian oil field and seeking drilling rights in Iraq. It recently won rights to develop a gas field in Saudi Arabia.
It was not entirely clear from the April report whether LUKoil had booked any of its Caspian finds. If the firm obtains an international audit and add the figure announced Wednesday to its total reserves, it would easily overtake Exxon.
Investors are closely following oil company reserves after Royal Dutch/Shell slashed its estimates by more than 20 percent this year.
Russia remains one of the few places in the world where oil majors can still book huge reserves, but investors usually focus on Siberia, rather than the Caspian Sea.
Among other Caspian states, no major oil fields have been found in Azerbaijan over the past few years, while Kazakhstan has so far managed only to find one huge offshore deposit, Kashagan, where reserves are comparable to Alaska's Prudhoe Bay.
The Russian sector of the Caspian Sea is believed to be less explored than Azerbaijan's or Kazakhstan's because LUKoil only began working on it at the end of the 1990s. |
