Page 19 - FSUOGM Week 20

FSUOGM PROJECTS & COMPANIES FSUOGM
SOCAR eyes oil storage in Ukraine
UKRAINE
Oil could be stored
in a section of the Kremenchug-Lisichansk pipeline.
THE State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) is interested in storing oil in Ukraine, but the country’s current legislation will not allow it, Interfax Ukraine reported on May 14.
“SOCAR reached out to us, saying: we want to store oil for a period of up to one year, after which we will make a decision on whether to process it [in Ukraine], transport [it] over pipelines in the direction of Belarus or put [it] on tankers and sell [it] in a free market,” Nikolai Gavrilenko, gen- eral director of Ukrtransnafta, which manages the country’s pipeline network, was quoted as saying by Interfax Ukraine.
“However, our legislation wouldn’t allow for that,” he added.
According to Gavrilenko, Ukrtransnafta has sent to the finance ministry a request for permis- sion to launch an oil storage facility.
He explained that oil could be stored in a section of the Kremenchug-Lisichansk pipeline where storage capacity is about 400,000 tonnes. Another 170,000 tonnes could be stored in the Pivdenny terminal, but this wouldn’t be enough to keep oil delivered by two tankers whose nom- inal capacity is 90,000 tonnes.
Meanwhile, there are plans to expand the Piv- denny terminal by adding four 120,000-tonne reservoirs, Gavrilenko said, adding that again, the execution of these plans requires passing legislation that is currently under approval at various Ukrainian state agencies.
Still, to attract foreign companies to store oil in Ukraine, the country needs to offer some privileges, such as exemption from VAT, Andrei Kobolev, head of Naftogaz, was quoted as saying by Interfax Ukraine.
“If we are allowed to offer those privileges, we’ll be able to attract more customers,” he said, adding that oil storage services could bring between $1mn and $3mn a month to the Ukrainian budget.
Incidentally, just three weeks ago Ukrtrans- nafta said Ukraine woould not be able to take advantage of the global shortage in oil storage capacity as its infrastructure is configured for oil transportation rather than storage.
Ukrtransnafta is fully owned by Ukraine’s state-run oil and gas company Naftogaz and runs a pipeline system across 19 regions with a total length of 4,767 km.™
Gazprom Neft drills first fishbone well at Chayandinskoye
RUSSIA
Gazprom Neft has been using fishbone techology to develop its most challenging oilfields.
GAZPROM Neft, the oil arm of Russian gas giant Gazprom, has announced the commissioning of its first fishbone well at the Chayandinskoye gas field in Yakutia in Eastern Siberia.
The oil producer has developed its own tech- nique for fishbone drilling, where multiple off- shoots are established from one horizontal shaft, giving the well a fishbone shape. It has employed the technique throughout many of its more geo- logically complex fields across Russia.
The well at Chayandinskoye was targeting the field’s oil rim, a thin layer of oil covered by its much larger gas reservoirs. It has a main shaft with a length of 1.5 km and six lateral branches, each measuring 830 metres in length. It flowed at an initial rate of 380 tonnes per day (2,785 barrels per day) – double the rate from standard hori- zontal wells drilled at Chayandinskoye.
Chayandinskoye serves as the main resource base for the Power of Siberia gas pipeline, con- taining around 1.2 trillion cubic metres of gas and 61.6mn tonnes of oil and condensate. Gaz- prom operates the field, but has hired Gazprom Neft to develop its oil resources.
Under long-term risk agreements, Gazprom
Neft is targeting oil rims and other oil formations at a number of other Gazprom fields.
Gazprom Neft is already flowing oil from seven wells at Chayandinskoye, after commenc- ing drilling in September last year. Full-scale development of the field’s oil rim is expected to start later this year, and Gazprom Neft aims to produce 3mn tonnes per year (60,000 bpd) of oil by 2023. The company is currently constructing a 70-km pipeline to feed this oil into the Eastern Siberia – Pacific Ocean (ESPO) system.
The plan is to sink as many as 44 fishbone wells at the field by the end of 2024, including five this year.
“The Chayandinskoye field is unique not just in terms of its reserves, but also in terms of the size and scale of the challenges we face here. Developing this oil-rim deposit – the reserves of which are classified as ‘hard-to-recover’ – is fur- ther complicated by the geological features pres- ent at Chayandinskoye,” the head of Gazprom Neft’s Zapolyarye subsidiary said in a statement. “The key to these deposits has proved to be cut- ting-edge drilling technologies and high-tech, intricately designed wells.” ™
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