Petrolinvest proved reserves 102 million barrels
WARSAW, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Polish oil firm Petrolinvest estimates its proved crude reserves at 102 million barrels and probable reserves at 1.03 billion barrels after it acquired additional shares, its chief executive said on Friday.
Petrolinvest PROL.WA, controlled by tycoon Ryszard Krauze, finalised a string of all-share deals this week to expand its presence in the potentially lucrative Kazakhstan oil market.
One of these deals doubled the company's stake to 100 percent in privately-held Emba-Yug-Neft, which has licenses to extract oil for the Zhubantam field in western Kazakhstan near the Caspian Sea coast.
A report by McDaniel & Associates Consultants estimated Petrolinvest's share of the reserves at 567 million barrels.
As the data was prepared before Petrolinvest increased its stake in the projects, the estimates need to be doubled, Chief Executive Pawel Gricuk told Reuters.
After the adjustment, Gricuk said his company had gross proved reserves of 102 million barrels and probable reserves of 1.03 billion barrels.
A find of more than a billion barrels would rank as a world-class discovery, on a par with multi-billion-dollar fields in Angola or the Gulf of Mexico. It would still be shy of the giants such as Kashagan in Kazakhstan or Iran's Azadegan reservoir.
Petrolinvest's volatile shares were up 12.6 percent to 335.50 zlotys by 1337 GMT, valuing the company at more than $700 million, but were still down by a third from a historic high reached last August.
The young company has yet to begin producing oil commercially but said in September it had achieved its first flow of crude, a modest 40 barrels per day. (Reporting by Marynia Kruk, editing by Anthony Barker)
