Energy hopeful Caspian Holdings lost £610,000 last year, which saw the company build its oil field operations at Zhengeldy in Kazakhstan and bring the field into production, and has applied for adjacent licences to expand its scope, writes Robert Tyerman.

Caspian, which came to AIM late last year with a £4.5 million fundraising after buying an indirect 70 per cent stake in Zhengeldy the previous March, began commercial production and sales in a small way in September. Since the end of last year, says executive chairman Michael Masterman, the company has drilled an additional four wells and produced more than 10,000 barrels up to the end of March.

He says Caspian, which still has £3.1 million in the bank, is drilling a well a month and has set a target of increasing production from 150 barrels a day now to 1,000 barrels a day. Winning the new licences would help with this and Masterman says he expects the Kazakhstan authorities to decide on the company's application in two or three months.

He says the stock market was, perhaps unreasonably, expecting Caspian to be producing much nearer 1,000 barrels a day already, and blames disappointment on that score for the shares' 10p fall to 33.5p today, where the company is valued at £25 million. The shares have speculative potential.

Caspian Holdings	AIM	£0.67m	0.62p	0.00p
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Other company articles:
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Kazakh cheer from Caspian			28/01/2008
Caspian upgrading projects			01/08/2005
Caspian bullish after £0.6m loss			28/04/2005
Robert Tyerman's exploration insights			30/03/2005