Kazakhstan's state oil company KazMunaiGas is planning a big push into Europe, as the fast-growing national champion expands downstream and pursues a greater share of the region's retail petrol market, Financial Times reported.
Daniyar Berlibayev, first deputy chairman of KazMunaiGas, said the company had plans to move into Ukraine and Turkey, and was eyeing petrol stations, import terminals and distribution points in the two Black Sea countries.
"We are expanding internationally, reaching from the well to the wheel," he said in an interview with the Financial Times in Astana, the Kazakh capital.
KMG, one of small band of fast-growing national oil companies, has become the main vehicle of the Kazakh state as it seeks to tighten its control of the country's oil and gas sector.
The company's increasing prominence reflects the rise of resource nationalism in the world's big oil-producing states over the last decade as strong Asian demand pushed oil prices up to record highs.
In recent years, KMG has muscled in to the international consortiums developing two huge oil and gasfields - Kashagan, the world's most expensive oil development project in the Caspian Sea, and the onshore Karachaganak.
Kashagan, one of the world's most difficult and costliest oil developments, is due to start production later this year. UK prime minister David Cameron was in Kazakhstan late last month to mark the start-up of the field's production facilities.
KMG has also made tentative efforts to expand internationally. In 2007 it bought Rompetrol, which owns two refineries in Romania and petrol stations in seven European countries.
Since then, it has invested billions of dollars to upgrade the refineries, enabling them to produce cleaner Euro-5 class fuels.
Mr Berlibayev said KMG intended to nearly double its oil reserves from 5.8bn barrels to 10.3bn barrels by 2020, in part through a $3bn exploration campaign. He said it would increase oil production from 420,000 barrels a day at the moment to about 700,000 b/d by the end of the decade.
That reflects a broader increase in Kazakhstan's oil production, as Kashagan comes on and output ramps up at other big fields such as Tengiz, operated by Chevron.
Mr Berlibayev said Kazakhstan could be exporting 2.2m b/d of oil by the end of the decade, with about 400,000 b/d of that going to China and most of the rest to Europe, particularly Black Sea markets.
He said KMG planned to refine a large chunk of these exports at its Romanian facilities. "We want to come to Europe and say - we have 5m tones a year of oil products: who wants to buy it?" he said.
But European demand for petrol and other refined products has fallen since the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recession, and European refining margins remain depressed.
Mr Berlibayev defended the acquisition. "If we didn't go downstream, we would only be selling crude oil at the border to Russia and China," he said. "We want to get into Europe, right to the petrol pump."