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Lukoil teams up with Gazprom in Barents
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| Courtesy of barentsobserver.com |
Russia’s largest private oil company turns away from last year’s statement not to invest in Arctic offshore.
“If someone asked me to invest money in Arctic exploration and development, I wouldn’t give a kopeck,” said Lukoil’s Vice-president Leonid Fedun a year ago. He argued it is much cheaper to go for the still untapped onshore fields in Siberia than to drill the Arctic seabed.
Today, Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov told reporters at the World Petroleum Congress in Moscow that his company will set up a joint venture with Gazprom by the end of this year to explore parts of the Barents Sea, reports Reuters. Gazprom holds licenses like Dolginskoye and Prirazlomnoye in the Pechora Sea, the easternmost parts of the Russian sector in the Barents Sea. Further north, Gazprom has the license for the famous, but not economically profitable, Shtokman field.
Alekperov says Lukoil will have a 34 percent share of the new venture.
According to Russian law, only state-controlled companies have the right to get offshore licenses. Private companies, like Lukoil, can therefore only get access to petroleum resources in the Barents- or other Arctic seas by teaming up with either Gazprom or Rosneft.
LUKOIL is a major international vertically-integrated oil & gas company, accounting for 2.1% of global output of crude oil. LUKOIL is implementing oil & gas exploration and production projects in 13 countries. Proved reserves as of December 31, 2012 were 17.3 billion barrels of oil.
Gazprom is a global energy company. Its major business lines are geological exploration, production, transportation, storage, processing and sales of gas, gas condensate and oil, sales of gas as a vehicle fuel as well as generation and marketing of heat and electric power. Gazprom holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves. The Company’s share in the global and Russian gas reserves makes up 18 and 72 per cent respectively. Gazprom accounts for 14 and 74 per cent of the global and Russian gas output accordingly.
Source: barentsobserver.com
