RusEnergy

05.12.2005 MosNews - Russia's largest private oil company Lukoil plans to ensure that there is no oversupply of the country's oil in Europe, CEO Vagit Alekperov was quoted as saying on Sunday, Dec. 4. "We will ensure that Europe is no longer oversupplied with Russian oil," Alekperov told German business daily Handelsblatt, according to a preview of the paper's Monday edition, Reuters reported. "Russian Urals crude oil ought to be significantly more expensive than it is now. New pipelines to China will take Russian, Kazakh and Azerbaijani oil away from Europe," he said, adding that the price of oil in Europe would rise. Alekperov said Lukoil planned to become one of the world's three biggest listed oil firms, and that it had a strategy until 2014 and the necessary oil and gas reserves to achieve this. "We want our oil drilling to reach 780 million barrels per year and to attain an annual gas production of 50 billion cubic meters a year," he added, without specifying a time frame. The company's CEO also noted that Lukoil had no plans to buy up units of the embattled Russian oil firm Yukos, saying that the latter had ramped up output unnaturally high and exhausted its resources. "We on the other hand will only increase our production by about two to four percent a year," he said. He said the company hoped the situation in Iraq would stabilize sufficiently for it to return to work on oil fields there soon. "I hope we'll get clarity from the new government about our business opportunities there by the end of 2006," he said, adding he planned to travel to Baghdad by May.