Gazprom Cozies Up to Exxon, Chevron
Gazprom plans to invite ChevronTexaco, the second-largest U.S. oil company, to help tap an Arctic gas field that may need $10 billion of investment to sell fuel to the United States.
Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller will meet executives of Chevron and ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, this week to talk about the Shtokman field. The Russian producer also seeks opportunities to market liquefied natural gas in the United States as soon as next year.
The offshore Shtokman field has enough reserves to supply America for about four years. The United States, which expects gas demand to grow 50 percent over the next 20 years, has been urging Gazprom to accelerate plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal in Russia's northwest that could supply the fuel. Gazprom at the same time is looking for new markets outside Europe.
"We want to strengthen our cooperation especially with ChevronTexaco," Sergei Kupriyanov, a spokesman at Gazprom, told reporters in Moscow. "We are trying to create competition between our future partners in Shtokman."
Gazprom and Statoil, Norway's biggest oil company, this month agreed to study plans to jointly extract gas from Shtokman. Gazprom is most interested in gaining U.S. companies' help in securing buyers for the LNG that would be produced, Kupriyanov said.
Kupriyanov said Gazprom was gradually losing interest in joining BP's giant east Siberian Kovykta field as it will soon gain much bigger exposure to projects on Sakhalin island.
"After we join Sakhalin projects via the acquisition of Rosneft, the potential attractiveness of Kovykta will dramatically decrease for us," Kupriyanov said.
The Kremlin decided this week to merge Gazprom with medium-sized Rosneft by the end of the year. Rosneft has a 20 percent stake in Exxon-led Sakhalin-1, which will be producing 250,000 barrels per day later this decade and plans to build a gas pipeline to Japan. Rosneft is also involved in Sakhalin-3, 4 and 5.
(Bloomberg, Reuters)
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