Oil and Gas Reserves Shrinking

The country’s oil reserves shrank by 7.3 billion barrels from 1994 to 2005 as the country failed to replace dwindling West Siberian reserves with new discoveries in East Siberia and other regions, an official said Friday.

“The proportion of reserves that can be extracted has fallen from 42 percent at the start of the 1990s to 27 percent,” Sergei Fyodorov, head of subsoil policy at the Natural Resources Ministry, told a conference.