Korea National Oil Corp (KNOC) said it is in talks with India's ONGC to store crude from Russia's Sakhalin-1 field, and will boost its storage capacity by about 20 per cent by 2010.

KNOC plans to expand its capacity to 146 million barrels from 121 million barrels in 2006, executive vice-president Abraham K Kim told an industry conference, as it seeks yet another joint storage deal to add to its emergency reserve stockpile.
"We are talking about storage to ONGC," said Kim at the conference.
Indian Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) was in talks with KNOC last year over the possible use of Korea's oil storage tanks, but no agreement was seen.
It has a 20 per cent stake in the Sakhalin-1 oilfield that will have peak production of 250,000 barrels per day (bpd). Industry sources say it is costly for ONGC to ship the Sokol crude from Sakhalin-1 back to India and the storage would give it more flexibility to sell the high-quality oil to North Asian buyers.
India has surpassed South Korea as Asia's third-largest oil consumer and is keen to engineer oil swaps with other big importers to cut down shipping costs on its growing imports from more distant sources.
South Korea, which imports all of its crude needs, has been actively seeking oil storage leasing deals to secure wider sources of supplies and reduce its heavy reliance on the volatile Middle East, where almost 80 per cent of its crude is sourced.
KNOC signed an agreement last month with Kuwait for joint storage of 2 million barrels of crude oil, hot on the heels of a deal in September with European oil major Total in September to store 2.2 million barrels.
The stockpiling deals give South Korea pre-emptive rights to buy the crude in case of emergency, while increased storage gives oil firms more sales options.