| Gazprom and Rosneft now have five common fields Gazprom and Rosneft decided to jointly produce oil and gas at five fields in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and on the Barents Sea shelf. Yesterday, company directors Alexey Miller and Vladimir Bogdanchikov signed an agreement to create a joint venture on a parity basis, to which licenses for the use of the subsoil of these deposits will be transferred.
The union of Gazprom and Rosneft began to take shape two weeks ago (see Vremya Novostey, September 21) , when the parties agreed to create a consortium to develop the Prirazlomnoye field, the recoverable oil reserves of which are estimated at 76.4 million tons. Now They decided to expand the area of joint activities and develop Shtokmanskoye (27 million tons of oil and 3.2 trillion cubic meters of gas), Kharampurskoye (153.7 million tons of oil and 750 billion cubic meters of gas), Vyngayakhinskoye (92.6 million tons oil and 106.5 billion cubic meters of gas) and Etypurovskoye (31.7 million tons of oil and 300 billion cubic meters of gas) fields.
The press services of both companies do not say whether investments will be attracted to the development of these fields, when and in what volumes: the joint venture being created will first assess the necessary costs and then consider these issues. Nevertheless, Rosneft press secretary Alexander Stepanenko claims that production at the Prirazlomnoye and Kharampurskoye fields can actually begin in three to four years, and his colleague from Gazprom Natalya Selivanova says that the first Shtokman gas will be produced in 2007.
The development of the Shtokman field is the subject of discussion at the highest level between Russia and the European Union (see Vremya Novostey, October 3) . It is not profitable to take on European companies as partners under existing conditions - this was confirmed by the recent withdrawal from the alliance with Gazprom for the development of the Prirazlomnoye field by the German company Wintershall. However, Europe insists, firstly, on obtaining a share of its companies in Russian projects, and secondly, on Russia’s entry into the energy charter, which means giving cheap and free access to any country to the domestic pipeline system.
Having replaced the Germans in the development of the Shtokman field, Rosneft, which is the authorized company for the implementation of production sharing agreements (PSAs), said yesterday that the newly created joint venture intends to speed up the preparation of the field for the conclusion of a PSA. If the field is developed under the terms of a PSA, then it is quite possible, according to experts, that development will accelerate, and companies will need to resolve issues of gas export to Europe, where the principle of diversification is currently in force, limiting Russian supplies to 30% of the importer’s consumption. Nikolay GORELOV |
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