Actuality March 14, 2008

   Transnational corporation Shell plans to develop own bus iness in the Astrakhan region in Russia.

Such are the negotiations' results of the company representatives with Alexander Zhilkin, the governor

of the region.

   According to Chris Finlayson, the chairman of Shell in Russia, Russia is the country

of strategic growth for Shell. "Exactly the Caspian region was always of great importance for us, in fact the corporation started its activity here one hundred years ago", the businessman marked.

"We are interested in opportunity consideration of application our experience and knowledge in the Astrakhan region", Finlayson underlined. "Its resources are huge even in the regard of world scale, and

the territory itself has a good strategic location.

More scale development of local deposits and mining, in our viewpoint, will play a significant role in capacities increase of South Stream project, and will positively influence the region industrial development in the end".

   Finlayson underlined that now one of the company main work directions in

the world is development of sulfur dioxide gas deposits with high sour components content.

Shell has some experience in extraction and process

ing of this raw material in Canada, USA, and Oman.

Among the o

ther issues Finlayson named sulfur handling. According to him, before the visit to Astrakhan this topic was examined in details both within the corporation, and with attraction of Gazprom specialists.

"It is concluded that on the basis of effective sulfur extraction and processing we could produce several types of products", Finlayson reported. The corporation is also interested in processing of hydrocarbons and construction of filling stations in the region.

However, there haven't been reached any concrete agreements on the meeting.

In Russia Shell owns 27,5% in Sakhalin 2 project, it develops Salymskoe group of fields jointly with Sibir Energy, and also prepares to develop bituminous deposits in Tatarstan in collaboration with Tatneft.