The Board of Directors is holding a meeting at Gazprom’s headquarters.

The Board of Directors has taken into account the information on Gazprom’s activities in East Siberia and the Far East.

It was pointed out that Gazprom’s participation in implementing the projects on natural gas production, transportation and marketing in the region was a Company’s core activity.

The Board of Directors has adopted a decision to consider the Company’s first and foremost challenge - participation in tenders and auctions for natural resources utilization, geological exploration and development in the Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk regions, Irkutsk and Sakhalin Provinces, and the Republic of Sakha. The other challenge is to organize cooperation with the region’s gas market players and to implement projects on gas supplies to Russia’s Eastern territories.

The Board of Directors ordered the Management Committee to allocate reasonable funds on implementing the 2004-2006 Investment Program projects.

Reference

Russia’s energy strategy up to 2020 aims to form and develop a new large gas production center in Eastern Siberia and the Far East. According to Russia’s Federal Government’s instruction of 16 July 2002, Gazprom is responsible for coordinating the implementation of the Program for developing the East Siberian and Far Eastern gas resources, creating a gas supply system in Russia’s Eastern regions, and providing the unified gas export channel to Asia Pacific.

Estimated gas reserves of Eastern Siberia and the Far East account for 6.6 bcm. Two large fields, the Kovytkinskoye gas condensate field (GCF) – 2 bcm, and the Chayandinskoye oil and gas condensate field (OGCF) – 1.24 bcm, have been discovered in these regions. These fields, along with the Yurubcheno-Tohomskoye OGCF (0.7 bcm), Sobinsko-Payginskoe OGCF (0.17 bcm), the Talakanskoye OGCM (0.05 bcm), the resource base of the Sakhalin I-II projects and the promising areas of the Sakhalin shelf are the basic fields to be brought on stream in the years to come. The development of these fields will determine the corporate strategy of natural resources exploration in Eastern Siberia and the Far East.

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