Ukraine Claims Shale Gas Reserves May Double

In an interview with Minister of Environment and Natural Resources of Ukraine Mykola Zlochevsky, Kommersant-Ukraine reports that reserves of shale gas in Ukraine are at least 30 trillion cubic meters, but could double after the completion of resource assessment by American experts.

According Zlochevsky, current estimates of Ukrainian experts and their counterparts from the U.S. are very different, because under the concept of shale gas in different countries "implies not only the gas associated with organic shales, and coalbed methane, gas caps, and methane gas tsentralnobasseynovogo type."

In February, U.S. and Ukrainian officials signed an memorandum of cooperation to deploy the U.S. Geological Survey to assess potential energy resources in Ukraine, including an appraisal of shale gas resources from unconventional sources.

State owned Naftogaz Ukrainy and ExxonMobil have entered into a memorandum under which the companies will jointly pursue exploration Ukrainian reserves of shale gas, coal mine methane and other alternative types of gas.

Zlochevsky said that Ukraine will hold a tender on product sharing agreements in early to mid-summer 2011.  In addition to ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Chevron Corp., TNK-BP and Gazprom have expressed interest in exploring for unconventional gas in Ukraine.

Ukraine, whose economy is more than half dependent on imports of Russian gas, has repeatedly stated its intention to increase its own gas production, including from unconventional sources, as well as expand the import of fuel from alternative to Russian sources.

In addition to domestic production of 20 billion cubic meters of gas, deliveries of Russian gas to Ukraine will grow by almost 10 percent in 2011 to 40 billion cubic meters. Gas consumption in 2010 in Ukraine was 55 billion cubic meters.

Read the Kommersant article (in Ukranian) HERE