ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- Turkmenistan's President Gurbangeldy Berdymukhammedov has dismissed gas officials for allegedly overstating the country's reserves.
Politkom.ru reported Berdymukhammedov acted after receiving reports that officials had doubled or even tripled data on extractable gas reserves at the country's Iolotan-Yashlarsk group of deposits.
In 2008 the British auditing firm Gaffney, Cline and Associates, had published the results of its audit of the South Iolotan-Osman gas deposit, concluding that the deposit qualified as "super-gigantic," with reserves estimated at 6 trillion cubic meters, nearly two times more than reserves of Russia's Shtokman deposit's 3.7 tcm. In February 2009, Gaffney, Cline and Associates Business Development Manager Jim Gillett presented his company's findings at a conference in London, which were confirmed earlier this month by Turkmen authorities on the basis of preliminary drilling data.
When it came time for foreign companies to file applications for tenders for the right to develop the South Iolotan-Osman deposits, confidential data, for which the companies had to pay several hundred thousand dollars each to be allowed to review, had been acquired by the companies, bypassing official Turkmen authorities.
The data immediately raised serious suspicions among the companies about the "lack of professionalism" of the data's compilation, with the companies concluding that the data knowingly or unknowingly grossly overestimated the extractable reserves of the deposits by several times, leading Berdymukhammedov to sack the officials responsible for the data's distortions.
