TNK Announces 15% Reserves Boost
15 May 2003

NEFTE COMPASS Tyumen Oil Co. has announced a 15% boost in its reserves. The company released revised audited reserves of 9.09 boe for the end of 2002, compared with 7.9 billion boe the year before. The new data, based on evaluations made according to US Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) rules, places the company's proven crude reserves at 8.374 billion barrels, from 7.258 billion bbl at the end of 2001. The company's proven natural gas reserves rose to 113.8 Bcm at the end of 2002, up from 101.6 Bcm the year before. TNK attributes the majority of the increase to the effects of higher oil prices and improved technology shifting unrecoverable reserves into the recoverable category. The numbers also do not take into account the reserves of the Yamal-Nenets autonomous gas producer Rospan, in which TNK owns 44% and will manage for the next seven years. Rospan's fields contain 950 Bcm of gas reserves and some 180 million tons of gas condensate according to previous estimates. Lukoil recently released newly audited reserves of 19.7 billion boe for the end of 2002, while YukosSibneft unveiled its end-2001 figure of 19.4 billion boe in combined reserves a week earlier. When BP agreed to take a 50% interest in TNK in February, it calculated that the group had at least 5.2 billion boe, while TNK used an estimate of 8.6 billion boe. An analyst at Moscow-based investment bank United Financial group said that the difference arose because BP calculated the figures using US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules for recoverable reserves, while TNK calculated according to SPE guidelines. The SEC's requirements are stricter than the SPE's.

CTF Holdings Ltd.

Alfa Group Consortium is one of Russia’s largest privately owned financial-industrial conglomerates, with interests in oil and gas, commercial and investment banking, asset management, insurance, retail trade, telecommunications, media, technology, as well as other industrial-trade and special-situation investments.

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