Azernews.Az

Kazakhstan's national oil and gas company KazMunaiGas (KMG) is going to increase the financing of geological exploration work to 1.5 trillion tenge ($1 - 151.17 tenge), chairman of the board of KazMunaiGas, Lazzat Kiinov, said at a briefing in Astana on Monday.

"We want to bring exploration financing up to 1.5 trillion tenge," Kiinov said.

He explained that the increase of reserves due to the discovery of new fields will increase the company's value.

"Now we are going to focus our exploration efforts, firstly on the Uzen field in order to explore its lower layers. Moreover, we want to conduct exploration 120-150 kilometres away from Uzen at another field, Kansu, which has gas," Kiinov added.

He recalled that currently KMG provides more than 26 per cent of the oil production, more than 83 per cent of the oil processing and about 67 per cent of the oil transportation in Kazakhstan. At the same time, the company plans to increase oil production from the current 21 million tons to 35 million tons.

According to him, Kazakhstan's unexplored oil reserves are estimated at 2.3 billion tons.