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Rosneft in Search for a New Partner on the Shelf
Oil major Rosneft is looking for a partner to develop a section of the Black Sea shelf. The company earlier dismissed Total as a partner in the project. Now Statoil an ExxonMobile are high on Rosneft’s list.
Rosneft is still interested in working on the shelf of the Azov and Black Seas, the oil producer’s first vice-president Sergey Kudryashov said Thursday in an interview published on Rosneft’s corporate web-site. The company is currently collaborating with LUKOIL, drilling the first well in the Temryuk-Akhtarsk sector of the Azov Sea shelf. In the Black Sea, Rosneft has been holding a license for the Tuapse progib section since 2003 but has not gone far with it. The oil firm is now looking for “ways to speed up the project” and shopping around for partners, Mr. Kudryashov said. Rosneft on Thursday would not give details on the list of possible partners.
The 12,000 sq. km Tuapse progib stretches from Novorossiysk to Tuapse. The section’s oil reserves are estimated at 100 million metric tons.
Having won the license for the section in 2003, Rosneft declared plans to develop it with France-based Total. The parties, however, failed to reach any agreement following a trail over another project of Rosneft where Total also had its interest.
Rosneft is currently looking for a major Western company to join it in the Tuapse progib, a Kommersant source says. ExxonMobile, which is working with Rosneft in the Sakhalin-1 project, said they were examining the possibility but would not give any details. A source of Kommersant has reported that Norway’s Statoil has also received an offer to work in the Tuapse section.
Under the license agreement, Rosneft is to drill the first well in the section before 2010, which will be extremely difficult and costly to do. “Rosneft wants to share risks and cost,” says Valery Nesterov from Troika Dialog says. “It does not operate any shelf project on its own.”
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 02, 2007
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