“An application to change the license agreement for Shtokman has been received. The working group has not yet considered it,” deputy head of the agency chief Igor Plesovskikh said to Vedomosti. The timeframes “will be changed and moved to later dates than were envisaged in the license.”
The existing license agreement will probably be delayed until 2017-2018.
The Sthokman gas field in the Eastern Barents Sea was to be developed by a consortium consisting of Gazprom, which had 51 percent of the stakes, Statoil (24%) and Total (25%). Norwegian Statoil exited the project in early August this year.
Speaking at the ONS conference in Stavanger in August, Gazprom Board Member Vsevolod Cherepanov confirmed that the project would be postponed because the development costs are too high at the current stage. At the same time, the Gazprom official confirmed that “new data” is being collected and that the company and its partners should not take “hasty decisions”, BarentsObserver reported.
Also Andrey Krivirotov, who is head of corporate affairs in Shtokman Development Company, believes there is a future for the Shtokman project: “The fact that the Shtokman project is put on hold gives us the opportunity to rethink the concepts and make it even better,” he said to BarentsObserver. Krivirotov sees the current situation as a possibility to build a better Shtokman project, where they also have the chance to implement new technical solutions.
