MOSCOW (RIA Novosti) - Gazprom moved Friday for the government to waive competitive bidding procedures when issuing licenses to develop natural gas deposits, eyeing the Sakhalin III project in the Far East. Alexander Ananenkov, a deputy chairman of the Russian energy giant's management committee, told a parliamentary commission: "We would like a law to be passed under which licenses would, in exceptional circumstances, be issued at the discretion of the Russian government to ensure the implementation of intergovernmental agreements on natural gas deliveries from Russia."

He said the existing license distribution system jeopardizes, in particular, an intergovernmental agreement with South Korea, adding that to ensure stable gas supplies, the license for the Sakhalin III project should be issued to Gazprom.

He said there is no other resource base except Gazprom to ensure that Russian gas shipments to South Korea start in 2012 as planned.

The field in the Sea of Okhotsk holds over 800 million metric tons of oil and more than 900 billion cubic meters of gas in estimated reserves.

The state-controlled oil company Rosneft holds a license to develop the Venin block off Sakhalin Island. It holds a 49.8% in the block's operator, Venineft. The region's Sakhalin Oil Company and China's Sinopec each own the remaining 25.1%.

U.S. companies Mobil, Texaco, and Exxon won a tender for licenses on the three remaining blocks of the field in 1993 under a production-sharing agreement (PSA), but the Russian government annulled the results of the tender in 2004, citing changes in tax laws on PSAs.

Gazprom said earlier it aims to become a major oil and gas producer and distributor on Sakhalin Island and is interested in buying the entire gas deposits under the Sakhalin I project.

The project, operated under a production-sharing agreement by Exxon Neftegas Limited, a subsidiary of U.S. oil major ExxonMobil, is located on Sakhalin's northeastern shelf, and is expected to bring around $52.2 billion to the Russian budget by 2054, when production is scheduled to end.