Russia and Kazakhstan on Wednesday signed a US$23 billion (¤19.4 billion) production sharing agreement to develop one of the Central Asian nation's largest oil and gas fields. Executives from Russian state-run oil company Rosneft and the Kazakh national oil and gas company, Kazmungaz, signed the deal at a ceremony in the Kazakh capital, Astana. The deal envisages equal investments in the Kurmangazy field, located offshore in the Caspian Sea, with an estimated 980 million tons of known oil and gas reserves, said Baktykozha Izmukhambetov, Kazakhstan's first deputy energy minister. Extraction of the oil and gas could begin in a decade. "We have worked on the Kurmangazy project since 2002. This is the completion of a huge amount of work," said Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attended the signing ceremony along with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Putin was in Astana for a regional security alliance summit.
