RU

Technical expert witness involvement in CIS and CEE oil and gas arbitrations

March 16, 2020

Introduction

It is hardly surprising that there are a significant number of arbitrations for oil-related matters, particularly in CIS countries. This stems from the fact that the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have large volumes of proven oil reserves. Typically, technical experts are involved in assessing the reserves and resources for oil and gas exploration in the context of arbitration investment disputes.

In the case of gas reserves, the CIS countries are even more important, as in oil volumes. The Russian Federation has the largest gas reserves in the world and those for Turkmenistan as also sizeable. The largest source of disputes for gas involves gas pricing and the experts for this are usually economists rather than technical experts. However, technical experts are involved in gas disputes typically looking at gas supply and demand or gas/liquefied natural gas plant construction disputes.

The full version of the article is available here.

David Aron
Managing Director, 

Petroleum Development Consultants, UK