OAO Gazprom will hold talks with ConocoPhillips and BP Plc on a planned pipeline linking Alaska to the continental US, as Russia’s natural-gas exporter strives to become a global energy company.
“We’re very pleased that Conoco supported the idea of discussing this project together with us,” Deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev said in an interview at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on Saturday.
ConocoPhillips and BP, which hold leases to gas reserves in Alaska, are competing with TransCanada to build a pipeline to the continental US. Moscow-based Gazprom, operator of the world’s largest gas pipeline network, also plans to talk with TransCanada about joining the rival project, Medvedev said earlier on Saturday.
Gazprom, which wants to enter the North American market with shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG), agreed to supply the proposed Rabaska terminal in Quebec last month. Gazprom plans to make Russia’s first shipments of LNG to world markets from its Sakhalin-2 project in the Pacific Ocean next year.
Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller met with his Conoco counterpart James Mulva in St Petersburg on Saturday. Miller talked with BP CEO Tony Hayward in Moscow on Thursday. Miller told the St Petersburg forum on Saturday that Gazprom had approached Conoco and BP on joining their Alaska pipeline.
“We don’t just want to participate; we want to bring value,” Medvedev said about joint development of an Alaska pipeline.
Either project will cost “dozens of billions of dollars,” he said.
Gazprom, the world’s largest gas producer, has decades of experience in building high-pressure gas pipelines in environmental conditions similar to Alaska’s.
“As a principle, we’d like to participate in all parts of the value chain, including transportation and potentially upstream,” Medvedev said about the company’s ambitions in North America.
Conoco holds 20 percent of OAO Lukoil, Russia’s largest independent oil company.
BP agreed last year with Gazprom to form a global venture with at least US$3 billion in assets. Medvedev said a “menu of potential assets” are under discussion from which it’s “not easy to choose the most delicious” items they will establish projects. BP’s Russian venture still hasn’t completed a deal to sell its Kovykta field in Siberia to Gazprom amid a shareholder dispute with TNK-BP’s Russian billionaire owners.
The Alaska pipeline, which may start operating in 2017, would ship 127 million cubic meters of gas a day over 2,700km. This would allow production of an estimated 990 billion cubic meters of gas from the state’s North Slope.
Calgary-based TransCanada owns Canada’s largest gas pipeline system.
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