ST. PETERSBURG — "British Petroleum claims that Russia has oil reserves of 60 billion barrels. This very modest figure gives rise to the thought that it was no coincidence that a law declaring Russia's oil reserves to be a state secret came into force in February 2004. Russia's real oil and gas reserves have not proved to be as vast as the Russian political elite's fevered imagination would have had it. Given Russia's current export rates for oil resources, the country could well become an oil importer in the foreseeable future.
A map of supposedly classified oil reserves in the Barents Sea area. Bellona It was apparently for this reason that on November 11th 2003, President Vladimir Putin approved a change—encoded in special Federal Law No. 153—to Article 5 of the Federal Law On State Secrets. The change added the quantity and volume of reserves, methods, locations and amounts of extraction, production and consumption of Russia's strategically valuable fossil-fuels to the list of state secrets.
The list of natural resources that were classified was spelled out in the Russian Government's Special Decree No. 210 of April 2d 2002, which included "information on the balance of subsurface reserves of oil and gas dissolved in oil." It is however possible that the explanation is much simpler, and that because nobody can ever be entirely sure of anything in Russia— especially in such a dense field as geology—it was decided to classify reserve volumes of oil in order to avoid the headache of measuring them precisely. End of story.
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Interestingly, information on Russia's oil reserves appears regularly in British Petroleum's BP Statistical Review. According to the news agency Media-Press, a report citing BP that appeared on the web site RusEnergy on April 19th 2004, Russia has confirmed oil reserves of 60 billion barrels, and that it is extracting 7,698,000 barrels per day as of June 2003 with a consumption of 2,469,000 barrels. For the purposes of comparison, according to the SHANA agency, Iran has proven reserves of 130 billion barrels, an extraction of 3,729,000 barrels per day with a consumption of 1,350,000 barrels. This comparison is extremely depressing for the Kremlin's 'dreamers'— who therefore do indeed have something to hide."
EDIT
http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=5631