Turkmennebit signs memorandum of understanding with Petronas on offshore exploration blocks

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Turkmennebit signs memorandum of understanding with Petronas on offshore exploration blocks

KUALA LUMPUR. April 24 (Interfax) - The Turkmennebit concern has signed a memorandum of understanding with Petronas Carigali (Turkmenistan) on offshore exploration blocks, an Interfax correspondent reported from the ceremony.

The agreement includes around five blocks, Turkmennebit head Guvanch Agajanov said.

The Turkmen sector of the Caspian Sea is divided into 32 license blocks. Experts estimate the reserves in this region at 12.1 billion tonnes of oil and condensate and 6.1 trillion cubic meters of gas.

Investors are being offered, among others, Blocks 11, 12, 16, 21, 23 and 24, Agajanov said earlier at the International Forum to Attract Foreign Investments in Turkmenistan's Economy. The first three sites are adjacent to areas where Malaysia's Petronas is already operating. Exploration wells drilled on Blocks 11 and 12 in 2008 and 2015 revealed nine promising structures.

In 2009, the German company RWE Dea AG was granted a license for exploration work on the contractual area of offshore Block N 23 for six years. If hydrocarbon reserves were discovered, the operator was to be granted a license for industrial production for 25 years, but no continuation followed.

There was interest in Block N 21, whose recoverable reserves are preliminarily estimated at about 219 million tonnes of oil and 100 billion cubic meters of gas, from Russian companies such as Itera, Zarubezhneft and Rosneft at various times.

Petronas Carigali (Turkmenistan) Sdn Bhd (the Turkmen subsidiary of Malaysia's Petronas) signed a production sharing agreement (PSA) with the government of Turkmenistan in 1996 for the exploration and extraction of hydrocarbons at Block 1 in the Turkmen part of the Caspian Sea, which includes the Magtymguly, Diyarbakir and Garagol-Deniz fields. Since the start of the project in Turkmenistan, the company has produced 15 million tonnes of oil, 34.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas, and the total investment in the project has amounted to $11.4 billion.