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Third shipment of Prirazlomnoye oil delivered to Europe

The ice-classed tanker “Mikhail Ulyanov” loading oil from Russia's first Arctic offshore oil field Prirazlomnoye in the Pechora Sea.

Gazprom Neft has so far shipped 200,000 tons of oil from its platform in the Russian Arctic.

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The 70,000dtw tanker “Mikhail Ulyanov” has delivered the third shipment of oil produced at the Prirazlomnoye field to consumers in northwestern Europe, Gazprom Neft writes in a press release.

Shipments from the field totaled approximately 200,000 tons in 2014. A fourth tanker is expected to be loaded before the end of the year. The company has earlier said that at least 300,000 tons of oil will be extracted in 2014.

When in full production, the platform is expected to produce a total of six million tons per year.

Gazprom plans to complete drilling of an absorption well before the end of 2014, and several more development wells in 2015.

The first shipment of the new Arctic crude blend that Gazprom calls ARCO was delivered to the global market in April 2014. This oil is slightly heavier than the normal Urals blend that Russia exports, and buyers have been given a discount.

Prirazlomnoye is the world’s first project involving oil extraction on the Arctic shelf using a stationary platform. The Prirazlomnaya platform received the world’s attention in September 2013, when two journalists and 28 activists from Greenpeace, later dubbed “the Arctic 30”, were arrested and imprisoned in Murmansk for over two months following a protest against Arctic drilling. The whole crew of Greenpaece’s vessel “Arctic Sunrise”, were first charged with of piracy. Later this was replaced with charges of hooliganism, which according to Russian law have a maximum punishment of seven years. The charges were dropped in December 2013.