He also championed the development of a huge gas field off the coast of Gaza operated by British Gas.
By the end of April, Gazprom is expected to announce its international partners in developing a huge gas field in the Barents Sea, one that holds seven times the amount of gas that Europe uses each year.
With nationalization now virtually absent from Peru's political vocabulary, Royal Dutch/Shell plans to negotiate a contract this year to exploit a huge gas field called Cami-seas, which the company discovered almost a decade ago.
A near identical conflict involves a second major Palestinian project for which Mr Blair is lobbying heavily – the development of a huge gas field off the shore of Gaza worth more than $6 billion.
It is already trying to inveigle Japan into feasibility studies for exploitation of a huge gas field at Kovyktinskoye near Irkutsk, and for building a gas pipeline costing $10 billion to run from Irkutsk through Mongolia to China, South Korea and, ultimately, Japan itself.Japan hesitates to give a straight answer.
Gazprom is also in talks with a short list of five major energy companies to develop a huge gas field in the Barents Sea, far above the Arctic Circle off western Russia, hoping to ship significant quantities of liquefied natural gas directly to the United States, the world's largest energy consumer.
And last month, the Shtockman consortium that had been looking to exploit a huge gas field in the Russian Barents Sea put the plan in mothballs, saying it is too costly for now.
Saudi Arabia this week, after much shillyshallying, invited foreign firms to bid to help to develop its huge gas-fields.
Several groups of Western oil companies, led by ExxonMobil, will soon develop Saudi Arabia's huge natural gas fields.
