Date
Author
Кирилл МЕЛЬНИКОВ; Алексей ГРИВАЧ
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
Caravan of licenses
Rosneft and Gazprom will receive one and a half dozen subsoil plots without competition
Despite active criticism of Gazprom and Rosneft by the Ministry of Natural Resources for passivity in the development of offshore fields, the bureaucratic process of preparation for issuing new licenses to state-owned companies continues to run its course. As the deputy head of the department, Sergei Donskoy, said yesterday, at the request of the companies, during this year the rights to a number of more deposits and blocks may be transferred to them. “They submitted applications, it is being considered,” the official said. According to him, Gazprom is applying for seven or eight licenses, and Rosneft is applying for five or six.Rosneft declined to comment and seemed dissatisfied with the revelations of the Ministry of Natural Resources. The press service of Gazprom told Vremya Novostey that applications for offshore areas were not submitted, but “at the request of the Federal Agency for Subsoil Use (Rosnedra), Gazprom sent its proposals for licensing subsoil areas on the shelf until 2020.” . The request was received in December last year and was granted.
At the same time, the leadership of the Ministry of Natural Resources, represented by Minister Yuri Trutnev, expresses dissatisfaction with the work of state-owned companies on the shelf and has already proposed liberalizing the rules for access to offshore resources. According to the department's estimates, it will take at least 150 years to implement the shelf development program at the current pace. “After all, now, for example, Rosneft receives these fields, and then begins to dispose of them. This is the property of the state and all residents of Russia, and not just Rosneft shareholders,” the minister said in January. According to him, the distribution of rights to work on the shelf should be carried out not by joint-stock companies, but by the state, and this will also require attracting foreign investment. Deputy Prime Minister for the Fuel and Energy Complex and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Rosneft Igor Sechin, in turn, at one of his recent meetings with President Medvedev, said: “Offshore projects are of strategic importance, and proper state control must be established over them.”
Gazprom and Rosneft, according to the Law “On the Shelf” of July 18, 2008, have a monopoly right to obtain licenses for the development of offshore gas and oil reserves. In addition, nine large gas fields discovered on the shelf of the Barents, Kara and Okhotsk seas fell into the federal strategic reserve fund, which the government can transfer without competition to the owner of the gas transmission system (that is, Gazprom). Last year, the gas concern already managed to obtain licenses for 11 fields from the list, including four offshore fields - Antipayutinskoye, Tota-Yakhinskoye and Semakovskoye, located on land and sea at the same time, and the offshore Kirinskoye field. There are still five fields left in the undistributed fund. Ledovoye (about 450 billion cubic meters), Ludlovskoye (220 billion cubic meters) and Murmanskoye (no data) on the Barents Sea shelf, as well as the larger Leningradskoye and Rusanovskoye fields in the Kara Sea.
A source at Gazprom explains that the list of licensing proposals includes fields from the list of strategic ones and blocks that require additional exploration. Let us recall that last year the concern also received licenses for three blocks of the Sakhalin-3 project (Ayashsky, East Odoptinsky and Kirinsky) and the West Kamchatka block without competition. At the same time, Rosneft also laid claim to these assets. The oil company even had a geological exploration license for the Kamchatka shelf project, which was revoked at the request of Gazprom, which received instructions to gasify Kamchatka.
In addition, last year, the head of Gazprom, Alexey Miller, turned to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with a request to transfer to the company the rights to four more fields located in Yakutia - Srednetyungskoye, Tas-Yuryakhskoye, Sobolokh-Nedzhelinskoye and Verkhnevilyuchanskoye. Official applications have been submitted, confirmed by the company, but there are no decisions yet.
This year, Rosneft, which previously lost to Gazprom the fight for the right to develop areas from the unallocated fund, finally hit the jackpot. Rosnedra issued her licenses for two areas in the Sea of Okhotsk. The corresponding government decree provided only their coordinates, which are approximately located inside the Astrakhan maritime structure (in particular, the Nekrasovsky section). In February, the head of Rosneft, Sergei Bogdanchikov, again appealed to Mr. Sechin with a request to hurry up Rosnedra with a decision to transfer new licenses to the company on a non-competitive basis.
At the same time, it is known that according to the list of offshore resources of interest to the company, compiled back in 2008 and then sent to Mr. Sechin’s office, in 2010 Rosneft was going to receive the “Northern tip of the Chayvo Sea” (adjacent to the Sakhalin- 1"), as well as the Kashevarovsky and Lisyansky areas in the Sea of Okhotsk. In the Barents Sea, Rosneft set its sights on the Pakhtusovsky and Admiralteysky areas, which were explored by Sintezneftegaz of Senator Leonid Lebedev, on the Yuzhno-Russky in the Pechora and Yuzhno-Chernomorsky in the Black Sea.