Afghanistan's New Oil Discovery Could Increase Its Reserves By Tenfold

08-15-2010 • Businessinsider.com/

Afghanistan's Mining Ministry has announced the discovery of a huge new oil field, one that could be ten times the size of the nation's 150 million barrels of previously known reserves. Suffice to say that America might have yet another reason to hang around: Bloomberg: “A huge oil resource, which looks like a triangle, with an estimated 1.8 billion barrels of oil, has been discovered by Afghan geologists in cooperation with international geologists between Balkh and Sheberghan provinces,” Jawad Omar, a spokesman for the ministry, said in a phone interview today from the capital, Kabul. The field is a new discovery and was not among those found by Russian exploration companies, Omar said. Further research will be carried out in the next six months and the field will be tendered once all investigations are completed, he said.