Russia, Iran agree on launch date of nuclear power plant
www.chinaview.cn 2006-09-26 21:16:36
Special report: Iran Nuclear Crisis
MOSCOW, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Russia and Iran have agreed on the launch date of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, which is being built with Russian help, Russian news agencies reported on Tuesday.
Sergei Shmatko, president of Russia's Atomstroiexport company which is involved in building the plant, was quoted by the Itar-Tass and Interfax news agencies as saying the two sides had signed an additional protocol that set September 2007 as Bushehr'sstart date and scheduled the delivery of nuclear fuel to Iran for March 2007.
The agreement came after talks in Moscow between Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency and Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.
Russia and Iran signed the 1-billion-U.S.-dollar contract for the construction of Iran's first nuclear power plant in 1995. Enditem
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-09/26/content_5141275.htm
Russia's mixed messages threaten oil investment
Financial Times
The mixed messages Russia is sending about the future of some of its biggest foreign-led oil and natural gas projects threaten to undermine international investment even if Moscow fails to act on many of its threats, oil executives and analysts say.
Yuri Trutnev, Russian minister for natural resources, on Tuesday issued a thinly veiled threat to TNK-BP, the Anglo-Russian oil venture, that it could lose its licence to develop a giant Kovykta gas field in eastern Siberia.
Just two days earlier Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, said: "We are a long way from backing out of agreements we have reached, no matter how difficult the conditions were when they were agreed to."
David Clark, chair of the Russia Foundation, a think-tank, said Russia's threats were bad news for consumers: "Russia's increasing tendency towards energy nationalism is happening when it needs to attract more foreign investment, not less, in order to meet projected export demand."
Claude Mandil, executive director of the International Energy Agency, took a more resigned tone, saying: "We have been very cautious for some time [with our supply projections] regarding Russia. We see this kind of policy is not conducive to foreign investment."
But the dip in foreign investment and production growth could be short-lived as long as Moscow moves quickly to implement what oil executives believe it is intent on doing, namely increasing its state companies' role in exploiting its most precious resources.
Joseph Stanislaw, independent adviser to Deloitte and Touche, the accounting and consulting firm, said Russia did not necessarily want to ramp up production too quickly.
"People at the natural resources ministry and various other ministries are asking themselves, 'How much do we really want to produce, and how quickly?'," he said, noting that this had long been a focus of other big oil producers such as Kuwait, which want to keep their resources for future generations.
Giving Gazprom and Rosneft, Russia's main state gas and oil companies, greater control in the big foreign-led projects would give Moscow a better ability to answer that question on its own terms.
Mr Stanislaw said high oil prices had filled Russia's coffers, making it less dependent on immediate production growth and giving it room to play hard ball with international oil companies, none of which had been spared.
But once Russia had redrawn the playing field and international oil companies again had a set of reasonably stable – if less generous – terms, foreign investment was likely to recover, analysts said.
Ann-Louise Hittle, analyst at consultants Wood Mackenzie, said: "Despite sustained pressure on all of the production sharing contracts, we expect Russia output to continue to grow and play an important role in world oil markets. In the next 10 years, we see Russia's crude oil natural gas liquids rising nearly 2m barrels a day from 9.7m b/d in 2006 to 11.6m b/d in 2013."
International oil companies are facing increasingly nationalistic governments in Latin America and are finding few big new oil fields outside the Middle East, much of which is still off limits to foreign oil companies.
This means they will be loath to miss out on Russian opportunities, such as the giant Shtokman gas field, as long as their terms of engagement are clear.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15016338/