Russian energy giant Gazprom plans to spend some 14.9 billion rubles ($505 million) on oil and gas offshore development in India and Vietnam in 2010, a business daily said on Tuesday.

A Gazprom official confirmed that the Russian gas monopoly will invest 5.48 billion rubles ($186 million) in India's Bay of Bengal, and another 9.43 billion rubles ($319 million) in Vietnamese PSA projects, Vedomosti said.

However, the exact amount of work on Indian and Vietnamese offshore fields is not disclosed. Vedomosti said Gazprom is prospecting for gas in a block in the Bay of Bengal, where reserves are expected to be certified in 2012, and has six blocks in Vietnam, where gas production could start in 2015 at the earliest.

Denis Borisov, an analyst with the Bank of Moscow, told the paper the aggregate reserves of Gazprom's projects in India and Vietnam stood at some 1.1 billion metric tons of oil equivalent, which accounts for 3.7% of the company's proven reserves.

The paper described the prospected investment abroad as serious for the Gazprom 2010 budget even in comparison to Russian offshore projects. The allocation for Shtokman, a giant gas condensate field in the Barents Sea, will be kept at this year's level of some 13 billion rubles ($440 mln) in 2010, an insider told Vedomosti.

Gazprom has projects in a number of countries, from Kazakhstan to Bolivia, but it has not yet started natural gas production anywhere outside Russia.

MOSCOW, December 8 (RIA Novosti)