For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
February 24, 2005

Joint Statement by President Bush and President Putin on U.S.-Russian Energy Cooperation

Cooperation on energy issues remains an area of great promise for U.S.-Russian relations. We will work further to realize the vision for our energy cooperation in all aspects described in our statement in May 2002, including through the mechanisms of the Commercial Energy Dialogue and the Energy Working Group. Accordingly, we have instructed our ministers to continue their energy dialogue, concentrating on ways to enhance energy security, diversify energy supplies, improve the transparency of the business and investment environment, reduce obstacles to increased commercial energy partnerships, and develop resources in an environmentally safe manner.

We call upon our Ministers of Energy and Commerce to develop recommendations, which we can support at one of our upcoming meetings, on how to further intensify and develop our energy dialogue. Those recommendations will focus on identifying barriers to energy trade and investment, promoting initiatives to remove them on the basis of predictability, fairness and law, and suggesting specific proposals for cooperating in developing energy trade and investment.

We will promote the creation of transparent tax, legal, regulatory, and contractual conditions for our companies' cooperation, and support Russia's pipeline system development, which will create the preconditions for increasing deliveries of oil and gas export, including to the U.S. market.

We are interested in increasing U.S. commercial investment in Russia, so as to create additional capacity for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Russia, and also with the aim of increasing LNG exports to U.S. markets. We would welcome increased Russian oil exports to the world market and an increased presence of imports from Russia in the United States. We would also welcome expanding mutual investments in the energy sectors of both countries.

The initiation of several concrete projects should be targeted for no later than 2008.

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