Shell can change Statoil to Shtokman

On May 25, President Vladimir Putin should be held on a shelf meeting. One of the issues that will be discussed is the giant Shtokman project in the Barents Sea, which was estimated at $ 30 billion a few years ago, but transferred many times.

According to Reuters sources, a new partner, the Anglo-Council Shell, can join the project. Kommersant reports that Shell can change the Norwegian Statoil in the project. Now the fractions of the participants in Shtokman are distributed between Gazprom (51%), Total (25%) and Statoil (24%).

The possibility of changing the composition of the participants of Shtokman was stated by the deputy chairman of the Gazprom board Vitaly Markelov. According to him, the new composition of shareholders can be announced at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.

The situation around the project for mastering Shtokman is already difficult. The expected captratas ($ 30 billion) turned out to be much higher than those that were supposed initially (20 billion), there were no tax benefits. In order to reduce costs, the participants wanted to refuse to build an underwater gas pipeline from the shelf to the shore and installations of the integrated preparation of gas on the shore, having built only the LNG plant. For the full change in the scheme, approved for years, it was allotted only three months, and the scheme is not yet ready. The adoption of investment all the time is delayed until 2013.

At the same time, the sources of the publication in Gazprom, "" The Norwegian side does not really agree, behaves extremely nervously "and is not possible to quickly agree on a change in the development scheme of Shtokman.

Statoil has a retreat - the company recently agreed on partnership on the Russian shelf with the state "Rosneft".

However, Statoil does not confirm information about the possible exit from the project. The company continues to work with Gazprom, the Vedomosti spokesman Statoil told Vedomosti. Statoil is waiting for a positive investment decision on the project and fully supports Gazprom’s last plan - 100 percent liquefaction of all gas within the project, he added.