PRESS: Gazprom finds huge oil reserves offshore Sakhalin

MOSCOW, Feb 20 (PRIME) -- Gazprom has found 464 million tonnes of oil at the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye field, part of the Sakhalin-3 project, which could become Russia’s largest discovery in recent years, Vedomosti business daily reported Thursday, citing a source close to one of Gazprom’s service contractors.

“The data is plausible, there is a huge oil formation,” a source close to the Gazprom group, said.

According to government data, Russia’s largest deposit discovered in 2013 holds 12 million tonnes of oil, while the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye deposit may turn out to be Russia’s largest on the shelf.

“The discovery is very large, but Gazprom will have to change the development plan of the deposit which was initially a purely gas deposit,” said Sberbank CIB analyst Valery Nesterov.

But he said that oil is more liquid goods than gas, while the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye deposit is very conveniently located for exports to the Asian markets, making the production of oil more important for Gazprom.

The company plans to launch the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye deposit in 2019, while its peak output of 16 billion cubic meters will be reached in 2023-2024.

Gazprom also has the Kirinskoye and Mynginskoye deposits with 162.5 billion cubic meters and 20 billion cubic meters of reserves respectively.

Gazprom also raised the estimate of gas reserves to 682 billion cubic meters of gas from 563.9 billion cubic meters at the deposit.

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