TOMSK, April 27 (RIA Novosti) - Gazprom (RTS: GAZP) could sign an agreement with German utility E.ON Ruhrgas AG on joint exploration of the Yuzhno-Russkoe oil-and-gas deposit within three months, a senior official said Thursday.
"The agreement could be signed within three months and E.ON AG could receive the same stake [in the project] as [German chemicals company] BASF, meaning 25% of voting shares," the energy giant's deputy board chairman Alexander Medvedev said at a Russian-German economic forum in the West Siberian oil city of Tomsk.
The Yuzhno Russkoye oil and gas field in the Western Siberian Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area holds an estimated 1 trillion cu m of gas and 37 million tones of oil. It is a core deposit for the $10.5-billion North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP), an ambitious Gazprom-managed project to pump natural gas to Germany through a pipeline running across the floor of the Baltic Sea.
Gazprom and Germany's Wintershall, a 100% subsidiary of BASF AG, agreed in April 2005 on joint development of the field, which could need up to $ 1.3 billion in investment. The Russian company said at the time that E.ON could also join the project.
The economic forum is taking place on the sidelines of talks in Tomsk between President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel that will likely focus on bilateral economic cooperation, particularly on energy security, and the Iranian nuclear crisis.
