Page 14 - FSUOGM Week 46 2019
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FSUOGM PROJECTS & COMPANIES FSUOGM
Pobeda oil find uncommercial at current prices, says Russian official
RUSSIA
Pobeda was discovered a week after sweeping US sanctions were imposed on Russia.
DEVELOPMENT of the 2014 Pobeda oil discovery off Russia’s Arctic coast is not “eco- nomically viable at current oil prices and while international sanctions are still in place,” Russia’s natural resources ministry has said.
In an article published by the energy minis- try on November 13, Natural Resources Min- ister Dmitry Kobylkin said neither Pobeda nor another offshore Arctic find, Tsentralnoye-Ol- ginskoye, would be developed “in the near future” given current conditions.
Pobeda was discovered by national oil giant Rosneft and US major ExxonMobil in the Kara Sea in September 2014, a week after Washington and Brussels imposed sweeping sanctions on Rus- sia’s energy sector. The sanctions banned Western companies from providing technology, equipment or financing to offshore Arctic oil projects in Rus- sia, bringing work at Pobeda to a halt. ExxonMobil eventually left the project four years later.
Pobeda holds 130mn tonnes (953mn bar- rels) in C1+C2 oil reserves, according to Russian authorities.
Rosneft has not conducted any activity at the site in five years. However, this summer it announced plans to drill at another Kara Sea
block, Vostochno-Prinovozemelsky-2, in either 2020 or 2021.
The company identified Tsentralno-Olgin- skoye further east of Pobeda in the Laptev Sea in 2017, marking the first ever discovery in the region. The discovery well was drilled from the shore with a horizontal angle to save on costs. Tsentralno-Olginskoye was assessed to contain 80mn tonnes (586mn barrels) in C1+C2 oil reserves.
A number of large oil and gas deposits have been found in Russia’s Arctic waters, but so far only one field has been brought into production. Gazprom Neft’s Prirazlomnoye project, located in the Pechora Sea 60km from the shore, was commissioned in 2013 and flowed 64,000 barrels per day (bpd) last year.
In his article, Kobylkin noted that the Seve- ro-Obskoye, Nyarmeiskoye and Dinkov gas fields found on Russia’s Arctic shelf were not commercially feasible either. Severo-Obskoye was found by Novatek in 2018 and holds 320bn cubic metres of C1+C2 gas, while Dinkov and Nyarmeiskoye were reported by Gazprom ear- lier this year and comprise 390.7 bcm and 120.8 bcm of gas respectively.
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 46 20•November•2019
