Edinburgh- based oil and gas explorer Melrose Resources has landed a seven-year concession contract to extract natural gas from the Kaliakra field in Bulgaria, the government announced.

The new field spreads over 19 sq km and the company is required to extract 255 million m3 of gas between 2011 and 2015. Revenues over the seven-year period are expected to exceed USD 73 M.

Bulgaria's government granted in August a ten-year concession for the extraction of natural gas to the UK company Melrose Resources. The concession refers to the Kavarna deposit.

The news about the concession came a week after the government and Melrose announced the discovery of new natural gas deposits in the Black Sea off the northern Bulgarian coast, whose extraction is expected to bring down the natural gas prices in the country.

The Kavarna deposit is located in the Black Sea shelf near the town of Kavarna, and has an area of 4.36 square km. It is estimated to have about 773 million cubic meters of gas, and its extraction can start in 3-4 months.

The new deposit is located close to the Galata platform and the adjacent gas processing facilities in the region of Varna built by Melrose Resources.

The Kavarna deposit itself is not big but together with two other deposits nearby – Kaliakra and Kavarna East – it has a total of 3 billion cubic meters of natural gas.

In 2001, a Melrose subsidiary signed a 25-year concession agreement with Bulgaria to extract gas from a deposit in the Galata field.