Senior Gazprom executives met with State of Alaska and energy company executives earlier this week. They were interested in local business opportunities, including potential participation in one of the projects to build a gas pipeline from the North Slope tthrough Canada to the Lower-48. Wesley Loy reports for the Anchorage Daily News: Russian Gas Conglomerate Visits Alaska.
Loy's Russians are here to touch base with local officials and to brief Alaskan's and oil company executives about Gazprom and its background in Arctic energy development. They don't spend much time discussing specific projects.
As Loy, and this Bloomberg story point out, last summer Gazprom executives expressed interest in participating in one or the other of the North Slope gas pipeline projects currently under development: Gazprom woos Alaska Amid chill in Relations With U.S.
Gazprom, which earlier this year booked capacity at a planned Canadian liquefied-natural gas plant, wants to break into the U.S. market as well.
The Moscow-based company looked at LNG projects along the U.S. East Coast before holding talks with Exxon Mobil Corp. on its BlueOcean terminal. And it considered Conoco and Chevron Corp. as potential partners in its Shtokman development in the Arctic Ocean before picking France's Total SA and Norway's StatoilHydro ASA instead.
This visit got a lot of media attention. Here's a story from the New York Times: Russian Gas Executives Visit Palin's Turf which points out that this was a large delegation of high level and very well connected Gazprom executives:
The Russian delegation at the meeting on Monday in Anchorage unexpectedly included several close associates of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin....
Eight senior Gazprom officials attended the session, including the company’s chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller, a longtime Putin ally, and Aleksandr V. Golubyev, a deputy director who, like Mr. Putin, is a veteran of the K.G.B. and who has worked with Mr. Putin for at least 17 years, according to a biography posted on the Gazprom Web site.
“We had thought initially that only one or two people would be coming,” Marty Rutherford, a deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, said in a telephone interview. “But it turned out to be about a dozen.”
The Houston Chronicle has two stories this week about oil and gas development on Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East. Control of Sakhalin Island historically has been disputed between Russia and Japan, with the first Russian explorers and traders.
Posted by: buy r4 ds | January 27, 2010 at 08:40 PM