| Manas Petroleum is a Baar, Switzerland headquartered international oil exploration and development company. It was founded as a private company in 2004 and during its first two years spent approximately $7 million acquiring and advancing its Kyrgyz, Tajik and Albanian projects. Its portfolio now totals more than 5 million acres in 5 countries. Manas Petroleum's principal strategy is to acquire and farm-out key land positions in major oil basins which have large seismically defined prospects near significant oil or gas production. At the core of this strategy is that Manas farm-out partners pay all costs until commercial production allowing Manas to retain substantial carried interests. One farm-out and an option agreement with a total headline value exceeding US $120 million.
The Company's objective is to maximize potential growth while significantly reducing financial costs and risk. A further goal is project diversity, as it should ensure the company's rapid transition to a more advanced stage of its planned evolution: the co-development of major hydrocarbon assets. |
| Manas Petroleum's first project is in the Kyrgyz Republic, Central Asia's only democracy and member of the World Trade Organization. In the Kyrgyz Republic, Manas has acquired and farmed-out to Santos International Holdings Pty Ltd., 70% of its interest in 6 licenses, covering 3,152 square kilometers. This 70% is being granted in consequence of it funding and conducting a $54 million seismic, exploration and appraisal drilling program. An independent engineering report by Scott Pickford (London) assigns a potential of P50 in place resource of 1.2 billion barrels for 10 of the licenses' prospects. |
| Adjacent to Manas Tuzluk Prospect within the Kyrgyz Republic license area, Manas acquired an Exploration license in Tajikistan. The geology is an extension of the Manas Kyrgyz Northern license area principally the Tuzluk area. Similar to Tuzluk the Tajik license has oil production, oil seeps and numerous large seismically defined prospects. Manas has now identified more than 30 leads and prospects on both its Kyrgyz and Tajik licenses. |
| In Eastern Europe Manas Petroleum has completed two production sharing contracts (PSC's) for four blocks (A,B,D&E) covering approximately 3,000 square Kilometers in Albania, approximately 80 kilometers north of the 2 billion barrel (in place) Patos Marinzas, Europe's largest onshore oil field. During the 1990s, Shell and Coparex identified prospects within these blocks. The DWM team in Albania is further refining a series of Shell-sized, and in its opinion exceptional prospects to the drilling stage. Further seismic reprocessing has started and acquisition is planned in the coming months prior to the drilling of wells as part of the work commitments. |
| Manas Petroleum has a 50% interest in a consortium with Improved Petroleum Technology a Texas based independent Company in the 6,600 square Kilometer (1.6 million acre) Tranquilo block in the Magallanes Basin, Southern Chile. The block's known seismically defined prospects and leads are estimated to have P50 (recoverable) resources of more than 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The block contains a producing gas field (operated by state owned ENAP). The existence of a petroleum system is proven by the Tranquilo gas field and in the wells Esperanza 1, San Jose 1 and El Salto 1. The Tranquilo block's southern boundary begins approximately 30 Km North coast of Skyring Sound and it has 1,428 Km of 2D seismic and 33 wells. |
One focus of Manas Petroleum's is the exploration and development of giant hydrocarbon assets in principally countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union (FSU) or its satellites, and that are now growing more moderate as they are increasingly influenced by Western Europe and China. As this occurs two critical elements remain for what Manas' management views as a historic opportunity to discover and develop major oil assets. The first is that though Russian exploration and development concepts and technologies were previously decades behind that of the Western world, Soviet record keeping of geological results across the union was excellent. For example, an overview of Soviet Kyrgyz Republic production and drilling records shows (see chart below) an obvious trend towards larger fields as depth is increased. It also indicates that more large discoveries should occur as deep tests continue. Reinforcing this conclusion is recent reprocessing of other meticulously kept Russian records: Soviet 1980s-vintage Kyrgyz seismic. The results Manas and its partners have obtained indicate the existence of numerous, large, deep under-thrust, potentially oil containing, un-drilled structures.
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Manas employs geologists and executives that are experts in this area, and have demonstrated they have access to much of this information. Manas is examining this archived data using state-of-the-art Western concepts and technology in its search for evidence of giant oil deposits.
The second element is that many of these Former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries' business environments are starting to show dramatic improvements, making operating within their borders highly attractive.
In Manas Petroleum's favor is the fact that its executives are extremely well acquainted with Former Soviet Union and Eastern European political realities. They have a proven record of being able to operate and acquire world-class assets there and they know which countries are evolving in an attractive pro-oil business fashion. They also possess crucial geological expertise enabling them to act extremely fast when opportunities arise. |
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