Clearly Oil and Gas Rich
The Fergana Basin has been producing hydrocarbons since 1902. The total discovered reserves from 58 fields are estimated to be in excess of 1.2 billion barrels of oil and 5.5 trillion cubic feet of gas, with cumulative production to date of more than 600 million barrels.
The Fergana Basin covers parts of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The areas of the basin with oil fields are principally in The Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan. The basin and the Kyrgyz Republic lie within an oil trend which begins in China's 15 billion barrel Tarim basin and ends in the west in the Caspian where its deep giant fields are well known. To the immediate north-east of the basin is Kazakhstan, home to the super-giant Tengzig oil field, the 10th largest in the world. China's Tarim basin is to the Fergana basin's direct southeast where the massive Xinjiang field supplies roughly a fifth of the oil that China consumes. The Fergana Basin, has the same geology as China's Tarim basin and like all three areas it was first known for its shallow oil production.
Manas' six concessions are in the Fergana. Working with the Kyrgyz state oil company Kyrgyzneftegaz, which is a Manas shareholder, the company has acquired what it views as the best lands in the basin.
Kyrgyz Deep Under-thrust Potential Not Tested Until The Late 1980s
The Fergana's production of light sweet crude oil goes all the way back to 1902. Significant reserve and production growth was just getting underway in the late 1980s when the Soviets started to test deeper more complex structural concepts. Local geologists could see that faults were not vertical but over-thrust, but dared not to contradict their bosses in Russia, who insisted that, similar to Siberia, all faults must be vertical. At the time the small size of most shallow fields in the Fergana was taken to indicate that its potential was limited. This was before the tectonic thrust faulting was understood by most Soviet managers. Most shallow production in the Fergana is from reservoirs that have lost much of their original oil. They are the remaining erosional remnants of anticline structures that were far larger millions of years ago. Even the remaining structure holds less oil as it has escaped to form seeps over the eons. The remaining deep structures, however, have not been subject to erosion nor have they had their original oil deposit seeping or draining away for millions of years. As a consequence, additional large, high pressure light oil deposits such as the Minbulak are expected to be found.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Soviet's exploration and discovery of large oil fields in the basin's deeper under-thrust structures; however, China's drill testing of the same types of deep structures in the Tarim basin continued uninterrupted. The result was China's discovery of over 15 billion barrels of oil.
Though the Fergana basin covers a smaller area than the Tarim basin, it remains rich in oil.
| Total No. of Fields | Total Oil Reserves | Total Gas Reserves | Cumulative Production |
| 58 | Approx. 1 billion barrels | 5.5 tcf | 600 million barrels |
America's United States Geological Service (USGS) says that the Fergana's undiscovered deeper under-thrust structures should contain another 3 billion producible barrels of oil. The USGS also notes that the oil should be contained in structures similar to the Minbulak, which are the type of structures already outlined on the Manas concessions. The primary reservoir is multiple layers of thick Paleogene (starting 65 million years ago) and Neogene (23 million years ago to present) sandstones. | 
