Russ Oil-Gas

30 April 2009 - Bloomberg - Royal Dutch Shell said it is examining plans with Gazprom to expand Sakhalin projects beyond their liquefied natural gas venture in the Far East. The partners plan "to look for further opportunities in the Sakhalin area, and we are working on that," chief financial officer Peter Voser said Wednesday on a conference call. The Sakhalin project is going well and will be increasing capacity until at least 2010, he said. Gazprom bought control in 2007 of Sakhalin Energy Investment, the Sakhalin-2 venture operator. The project partners loaded Russia's first commercial cargo of LNG for Japan in March. The project will have peak production of 395,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, Shell said today in a statement. Gazprom is considering Shell as a potential partner for the Sakhalin-3 project, said Stanislav Tsygankov, head of the company's foreign relations department, RIA-Novosti reported this month.