Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) -- OAO Gazprom Chief Executive Officer Alexei Miller called for tax holidays for natural-gas production in eastern Siberia and urged the government to grant new licenses, after cutting output targets at a field in the region.

Projects should be tax-exempt during their “payback period,” while export duties on gas from eastern Siberia and Russia’s Far East should be reduced or canceled, Miller said today at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Gazprom’s Chayanda field in Yakutia will pump less gas than planned, Miller said, without giving a forecast.

Gas producers in Russia, fighting a decline in energy demand, are pushing for tax breaks as a drop in prices for the fuel curbs revenue and output from older fields dwindles.

Lower yields from the Chayanda deposit will mean Gazprom needs other fields to secure volumes for a planned pipeline from Yakutia to Khabarovsk and Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, Miller said. Gazprom is seeking four more licenses in Yakutia this year after the state granted it at least 10 fields, including Chayanda, in 2008.

Chayanda holds 1.24 trillion cubic meters of gas and 68.4 million metric tons of oil and condensate, according to Gazprom. The company wants to add reserves by developing the Srednetyunginskoye, Tas-Yuryakhskoye, Sobolokh-Nedzhelinskoye and Verkhnevilyuchanskoye fields, Miller said.

Yakutia Output

Yakutia will produce as much as 53 billion cubic meters of gas a year by 2030, according to Gazprom.

The company plans to pump crude at Chayanda in 2014 and gas two years later. The producer, looking to diversify its export markets beyond Europe, will ship some gas from Yakutia to growing Asia Pacific markets, Deputy Chief Executive Officer Alexander Ananenkov said in July.

State support, similar to that provided for oil companies in the region, should be determined as early as this year, Miller said, according to an e-mailed statement from the Moscow- based company.

To contact the reporters on this story: Stephen Bierman in Moscow at sbierman1@bloomberg.net; Anna Shiryaevskaya in Moscow at ashiryaevska@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 21, 2009 05:15 EDT