| Wintershall came to Russia again Gazprom and the German oil and gas company Wintershall AG decided to join forces to develop hard-to-reach gas fields in Western Siberia and, as ITAR-TASS learned yesterday, to create a joint venture in which the partners will have equal shares. This statement was made by the Chairman of the Board of Wintershall, Rainer Switserloot.
The German company's investments in the project, which is expected to be implemented in the Nadym-Purtazovsky district, will amount to $700-800 million, Mr. Switserloot said, “and at the formation stage only Wintershall will finance the project.” “We will create infrastructure at new fields, and the first gas that goes to Europe should fully recoup our initial costs,” he said. - That is, the new joint venture will not require the diversion of a single cent of Gazprom’s capital.
The program for the development of new gas fields in Yamal, designed until 2020, involves investments in the amount of $70 billion. But additional sources of production need to be found now. According to the chairman of the board of Wintershall, the joint venture intends to reach a capacity of 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. “Today there are specific plans and real opportunities to expand the production of blue fuel, in particular at the Zapolyarnoye field - from 30 to 100 billion cubic meters per year,” he noted. “However, in our opinion, the time has come to develop hard-to-reach deposits with an eye to the future.”
In this regard, the creation of a joint venture with a long-time foreign partner (at the beginning of the year the companies celebrated a decade of cooperation) looks quite logical. Moreover, the experience of extracting “complex” and expensive gas will be useful to Gazprom, since the reserves of Sinoman gas with a cost of 4-5 dollars per 1 thousand cubic meters are coming to an end.
At the same time, the Germans already have experience in participating in a joint project with a Russian concern. A couple of years ago, Wintershall intended, in alliance with Gazprom, to begin developing the promising Prirazlomnoye oil field on the shelf of the Barents Sea. However, the Germans subsequently froze investments in the project because they were unable to obtain guarantees for their share of the produced gas. However, the Russian government has not yet decided what to do with investors working under a production sharing agreement. Obviously, giving away gas in exchange for capital investments means creating competitors in the sales markets. Nevertheless, there is hope that there will be no such problems with the new joint venture, since we are talking about only 10 billion cubic meters per year, and not hundreds of billions. Alexey GRIVACHS |
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