Revaz Tevzadze, President of the Georgian National Oil Company is one of the global oil industry’s most experienced senior executives.

Nine international oil companies are betting that Revaz Tevzadze, President of the Georgian National Oil Company (Saknavtobi), and a veteran petroleum engineer, is right when he says that billions of dollars of oil and gas will be discovered in Georgia, both on-shore and Black Sea off-shore territories, within the next three years.

Exploration work is now underway all over the nation and in the adjoining Black Sea. Mr. Tevazdze says seismic and other other scientific information makes him 100 per cent certain that Georgia will produce one of the globe’s leading new sources of oil in nearest future, and sooner rather than later.

“We have created joint-venture companies with our international partners and we already know from our seismology that huge oil resources are present,” Mr. Tevzadze said in an interview with the Washington Times. “We expect more than two billion tons of oil and gas resources which will be worth in excess of minimum $ 100 billion dollars,” confidently explained the Georgia oil top executive.

Saknavtobi was founded in 1930 and began its search for oil and gas yielding about 1.3 million tons of oil from a total of seven oilfields up to 1974. Since the tenure of Mr. Tevadze began, in 1973, 15 new fields have been explored, producing 25 times more oil than in the earlier period. Georgian National Oil has been paying for its own exploration since the formation of the new Georgian nation in the 1990s. This has been done with the help of nine outside investors.

Two of the firms are American, Frontera and Anadarko. Oil companies from Great Britain, Switzerland, China, Canada and Germany are also represented. The companies are working new fields and also trying to reinvigorate old sources and have invested more than 167 million dollars since 1995. If the gushers come in during the next few years as predicted, these investments will pay off very well for Georgia and for its international partners.