Gaffney, Cline & Associates (GCA), the British auditors of Turkmenistan’s South Iolotan gas field, now rank it the second largest in the world, behind Iran’s South Pars.
The previous estimate, conducted in 2008, said the field held between four trillion and 14 trillion cubic meters of gas and made Turkmenistan into the world’s fourth-largest owner of natural gas deposits.
“It appears that the South Iolotan field is now easily the world’s second-largest gas field in terms of gas-in-place,” Peter Holding, GCA general manager for Russia and the Caspian, reported the Reuters news agency yesterday.
Holding declined to provide GCA’s audited reserve figure.
Turkmen government officials attending a conference in a Caspian Sea resort on Wednesday said that the state now estimated reserves at South Iolotan to be equal to 21 tcm.
Holding told an industry conference in the Caspian on Wednesday that new seismic data and wells drilled proved that ad South Iolotan and the adjacent Osman field should be ragarded as a single gas field.
Under ambitious plans proposed by Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan will more than treble gas output to 230 billion cubic metres (bcm) annually by 2030, all but 50 bcm of which is to be exported.
The country’s single largest export customer is currently China, though the government is weighing up the option of exports to Europe via Azerbaijan.
