It was recently picked to help Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas giant, develop Shtokman, a massive offshore gasfield.

ECONOMIST: Face value

The Marcellus is not what you might expect a gasfield to look like: the views can be spectacularly beautiful.

ECONOMIST: Fracking

Last year Argentina's Pluspetrol increased its estimate of the reserves in the Camisea gasfield in southern Peru by nearly 25%.

ECONOMIST: Oil and gas in Peru

Shell, for example, hopes to build offshore liquefaction plants that could be towed from one gasfield to another, dramatically reducing overheads.

ECONOMIST: Liquefied natural gas

The Salah gasfield project in Algeria, run by BP, strips CO2 from local natural gas and injects it back into the ground.

ECONOMIST: A survey of The future of energy: Dig deep | The

Bolivia's recently elected socialist president, Evo Morales, led troops into a Brazilian-run gasfield and unveiled a decree nationalising his country's oil and gas industry.

ECONOMIST: Politics this week | The

Happily, Tanzania's gasfield extends south to Mozambique, where Italy's Eni last month unveiled a find of 1.3 billion boe, matching similar finds by an American firm, Andarko.

ECONOMIST: African energy

If only every gasfield were like that.

ECONOMIST: Fracking