Page 12 - FSUOGM Week 34 2019

FSUOGM PROJECTS & COMPANIES FSUOGM
Gazprom Neft enters frontier oil and gas basin
RUSSIA
Taimyr is remote and underexplored.
GAZPROM Ne has marked its foray on to the Taimyr Peninsula, one of Russia’s frontier oil and gas regions, acquiring exploration rights to 12 plots spanning 5,000 square km.
e state-owned producer has secured sev- en-year licences for the Zapadno-Taimyrsky blocks, located in the west of the peninsula, it reported on August 21. Gazprom Ne obtained them under a new regulatory regime that per- mits licences for unexplored areas to be allocated without an auction.
Taimyr is situated east of the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas, where private gas company Novatek is establishing a major hub for LNG pro- duction. e peninsula, stretching for 400,000 square km, is remote and scarcely explored. But it contains the Yenisei-Anabar petroleum basin that borders the larger and more proli c Eastern and Western Siberian basins.
Several oil and gas deposits have been dis- covered in the far west of Taimyr, including the Baikalovskoye eld which state-owned Ros- ne is appraising with BP. Rosne also found oil in 2017 o its eastern shore, in the Laptev Sea, but is yet to propose development. Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil operator, also drilled an onshore well near the coast that year, but came up dry.
Gazprom Ne ’s newly acquired territory does not contain any known oil and gas. As such, the
company is taking on a high-risk but potentially high-reward endeavour.
“Taimyr is one of the most under-researched areas in our country,” Gazprom Ne CEO Alex- ander Dyukov said in a statement. “We estimate this region’s potential very highly, and are start- ing to put in place a geological exploration pro- gramme to investigate it.”
Gazprom Ne plans to analyse and consoli- date existing data at the blocks in 2020-2021, as well as conduct aerial geophysical surveys and geophysical eld work, in order to prepare its own exploration campaign.
As Russia’s third largest oil and gas producer, Gazprom Ne is already an established player in the Arctic. It operates Russia’s only o shore Arc- tic eld, Prirazlomnoye, along with two of the largest onshore oil projects in the region, Nov- oport and Messoyakha. e company has been able to expand its output at an impressive rate over the past ve years of almost 9% annually. In contrast, Rosne has only managed to raise out- put by 3.2% per year during that period, aided by its takeover of mid-sized oil company Bashne in 2016.
Gazprom Ne posted a near 30% year-on- year rise in net pro ts in the rst half of the year to RUB215bn ($3.23bn), thanks to rising output and higher oil prices. Its revenues were up 6.8% y/y, while Ebitda increased by 11.6%.™
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 34 28•August•2019