Gazprom take over Sakalin 2 project after shafting Shell

galway | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Friday December 22, 2006 03:00 by TJ - Shell to Sea

Putin : "Let's celebrate the shafting of Shell, what's your poison, Jeroen "

The New York Times is reporting that : Gazprom, the Russian energy monopoly, bought control of the world’s largest combined oil and natural gas development yesterday after a highly publicized campaign of pressure on its foreign operator, Royal Dutch Shell.

Under the deal, Gazprom will pay $7.45 billion for the controlling share of Sakhalin 2, the vast energy project in Russia’s remote Far East, north of Japan. The project includes offshore platforms, 500 miles kilometers of oil and natural gas pipelines, a liquefied natural gas plant and an oil terminal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the deal at a Kremlin meeting yesterday evening with executives from Gazprom, Shell and the Japanese trading houses Mitsui and Mitsubishi, which also own part of the project. According to a statement released by Gazprom. Shell reduced its share of Sakhalin 2 to 27.5 percent, from 55 percent; Mitsui to 12.5 percent, from 25 percent; and Mitsubishi to 10 percent, from 20 percent,

However, it appears that Shell & co have been shafted by Putin, as, so far, they thave sunk about $12 billion into Sakhalin 2, meaning they will recoup about half of their capital investment so far but will be compensated little for the estimated four billion barrels of recoverable reserves at the site. The Russians further shafted them by valuing Sakhalin 2 reserves at less than $4 a barrel of oil equivalent, a benchmark in valuing oil and gas deals, compared to an average of $4.90 a barrel at large Russian oil companies like Lukoil or Rosneft.

The Sakhalin 2 sale came just two years after Russian tax authorities confiscated the largest production unit from Yukos and sold 76.6 percent at a rigged auction to a newly created shell company, Baikal Finance, for $9.4 billion, an amount that Yukos executives said was far less than it was worth. That pumping asset, now part of Rosneft, is valued by investors today at more than $60 billion.