LUKoil opening up natural gas fields in Uzbekistan

According to Forbes the best performing Russian billionaire over the year was Vagit Alekperov, 55, chief executive officer of LUKoil, Russia's biggest oil company, whose wealth tripled to $12.7 billion although he came in a close 2nd to Chelsea owning playboy Abram Abramovich.

It has just been announced that his company LUKoil intends to commission a major gas field in Uzbekistan in 2007, currently the second-largest producer of natural gas in the former Soviet Union."The subsidiary of the Russian company LUKoil, LUKoil Oversees, has started designing work for a gas treatment plant at the Qandim gas deposit in central Uzbekistan," told me.

"LUKoil Overseesa a subsidiary of LUKoil, has started designing work for a gas treatment plant at the Qandim gas deposit in central Uzbekistan,"

"The work is part of the Qandim-Hauzak-Shodi-Qongirot project which is jointly being implemented with Uzbekistan's national holding company Uzbekneftegaz [Uzbek Oil and Gas],"

Uzbekneftegaz and Russia's Stroitransgaz announced in February 2006 plans to set up a joint venture in 2006 to carry out a project to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG) at the Mubarek Gas Processing Plant in Uzbekistan's Kashkadarya region, at a total cost of about $200 million.

Their plan is to to build a liquefied natural gas unit with a capacity of 36,000 tonnes of LNG (propane-butane mix) and 150 tonnes of gasoline (stable gas gasoline) per year. The unit will process 12 billion cubic meters of gas per year.

Karimov continues to build his ties with Mother Russia.