COP Casino Guichard Perrachon

   DOW JONES NEWSWIRES 
 

ConocoPhillips (COP), Mubadala Development Co. and Kazakhstan's state oil company have finalized a deal for offshore exploration and production in an 8,100-square-kilometer area of the Caspian Sea.

KazMunayGas will own a 51% stake while Conoco and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi government-owned investment vehicle, will hold the rest equally. The trio agreed to a memorandum of understanding in October.

The area in question had been the target of attention of both Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA) and Conoco before the Kazakh government granted exclusive exploration and production rights to KazMunayGas in 2007.

The property is estimated to have 4.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

Conoco and KazMunayGas are among the partners in another Kazakh oil field in which the state-owned firm said in January it would investment some $1.7 billion. That field, the world's biggest oil find in 30 years, has been mired in fighting about delays in starting production, as it is one of the world's most technically challenging oil projects.

-By Kevin Kingsbury, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2136; kevin.kingsbury@dowjones.com