Oil producer LUKoil will ensure that there is no longer an excess supply of the country's oil in Europe, chief executive Vagit Alekperov was quoted as saying on Monday.
"We will ensure that Europe is no longer oversupplied with Russian oil," Alekperov told German business daily Handelsblatt.
"Russian Urals crude oil ought to be significantly more expensive than it is now. New pipelines to China will take Russian, Kazakh and Azeri 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.
Alekperov noted LUKoil had no plans to buy up units of 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 2 to 4 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. |
