Less than a month after Rosneft expanded its historical agreement with ExxonMobil in the Russian Arctic, company President Igor Sechin this week visited Houston where he presented company priorities and met with US. oil industry representatives.
“I would like Schlumberger, Halliburton and others to listen to what I have to say: investments in the first phase amount to $14 billion”, he said in his presentation made at the conference CERA Week, adding that “you are welcome to get acquainted with out list of needed equipment”.
According to Sechin, his company intends to invest a total of $500 billion in its Arctic offshore fields, Vedomosti reports. The company recently annonced that it intends to start drilling in the Kara Sea, at the Akademicheskoye field, in 2014.
As previously reported, Rosneft and ExxonMobil in mid-February signed a new agreement which opens an additional seven major structures in Russian Arctic waters for exploration. The US. company will be responsible for the mapping and exploration of the fields. With the agreement, as much as 600,000 square kilometers of waters are now included in the joint venture between the two companies. The initial cooperation agreement signed by the companies in 2011 also gives Rosneft a 30 percent stake in 20 fields in the Gulf of Mexico.
The projects in the Gulf of Mexico will give us valuable experiences in deep-sea drilling and production, Sechin said, Gazeta.ru reports.
The Russian state-owned company is under pressure to expand its international cooperation in the Arctic, as it has taken on major license obligations in the area. In addition to with ExxonMobil, Rosneft has also signed agreements with Eni and Statoil. The company is reportedly also negotiating with Chinese companies about Arctic partnerships. Which exactly fields are being offered to the Chinese remains unknown. However, the Severo-Pomorsky, Yuzhno-Prinovozemelsky, Zapadno-Prinovozemelsky, Zapadno-Matveevsky and Russky, structures with an estimated resource potential of up to 2 trillion cubic meters of gas, could be the ones on the table, Gazeta.ru reports.
