Are Turkmenistan’s energy reserve figures fudged or not? Just over a week after allegations first surfaced that the Turkmen government’s claims are grossly hyped, the controversy over Ashgabat’s export capacity is still flaring. Representatives of the firm that conducted the original audit are vigorously defending their reputation for thoroughness. Meanwhile, a whistleblower says he remains confident in the accuracy of his sources’ information.
The results of an audit performed by the British energy consultancy firm Gaffney Cline & Associates, released just over a year ago, concluded that the South Yolotan-Osman natural gas field contains between 4 trillion and 14 trillion cubic meters (TCM) of gas. The most likely total is around 6/tcm. Such volumes would make the field one of the world’s largest and enable Turkmenistan to increase its annual production capacity by 70 billion cubic meters per year, roughly double the current level.
On October 12, two separate sources -- Russian journalist Arkady Dubnov, writing for the Russian newspaper Vremya Novostei, and a Germany-based non-governmental organization called the Eurasian Transition Group (ETG) -- alleged that the Turkmen government misled the independent auditors by providing them with inaccurate, hyped data. The end result was that Turkmenistan’s actual reserves are probably far lower than the estimate contained in the 2008 Gaffney Cline report.
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