Bahrain should drill deeper for natural gas and even look as far as Russia to meet growing demand for fuel as supply talks with its neighbours stall, Bahraini energy minister Abd Al-Hussein Mirza said.

Demand for gas in the country has grown rapidly in the last few years, pressing the kingdom to find new sources of gas to feed its refining, power and aluminium smelting industries.     

The Bahraini government expects drilling under a new gas exploration deal with US-based Occidental to start soon, but in the meantime it is considering importing gas from Turkmenistan or Russia because of slow progress on dealing with Iran or Qatar.

"Bahrain signed a framework agreement with Iran in 2008 and the negotiations made great strides but the negotiations were not completed due to disagreement over the price," Mirza told Kuna, the state news agency of Kuwait.

"Currently negotiations are frozen," he said, adding that Bahrain is studying the possibility of importing gas from Russia and Turkmenistan.

Bahrain's proven natural gas reserves stood at 7.7 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) at the end of 2010, according to the BP Statistical Review 2011, but the country produced only 1.3 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/day) in 2010, mostly from the Awali oil field.

Oxy expects gross gas production from Awali to rise to 1.6 bcf/day by 2014, but Bahrain could double its gas output by delving deeper under the Gulf.

"A government-appointed advisory company has proposed the digging of deeper wells... for the possibility of discovering additional quantities of gas in this field," Kuna quoted Mirza as saying.

"It will be possible to increase energy production from gas from a summer peak of around 1.9 million cubic feet per day to 2.7 million cubic feet per day in 2024." - Reuters