Rosneft: Green Light to Buy Gas Assets
The watchdog, known as FAS, said it had approved a bid by Rosneft’s TNK-BP Holding unit for Urengoy Gas Co (UGC) and Geotransgas, both in Russia’s Yamal-Nenets district in the country’s gas production heartland.
TNK-BP became a unit of Rosneft earlier this year, when the state oil company acquired its parent company in a $55 billion (36 billion pounds) deal.
Rosneft declined to comment on when it plans to buy the two assets, or their price. Alrosa President Fyodor Andreev was quoted as saying in May that the company values both assets at more than $1 billion.
Geotransgas and UGC hold exploration and production licences for the Beregovoe and Ust-Yamsoveysky gas deposits respectively, with total reserves estimated at 187 billion cubic metres (bcm), Alrosa said last year.
Geotransgas plans to produce 1.4 bcm of gas this year, the company said on its website.
Led by Igor Sechin, Rosneft has ambitions to become Russia’s second-largest gas producer with output of 100 bcm of gas a year by 2020, up from about 13 bcm last year, compared with dominant gas producer Gazprom’s 479 bcm.
As part of that strategy, Rosneft took over smaller rival Itera earlier this year. Russia, the world’s No. 1 crude producer, has lost its pole position in gas production to the United States in the last few years.
(Reporting by Katya Golubkova; Editing by Alessandra Prentice and David Holmes)
