East Siberian Producer Installs New Gas Gear
Eastern Siberian oil producer Irkutsk Oil (INK) has finished installing the main parts of a gas fractionation unit in the town of Ust-Kut, it said on May 6.
The project, which will separate hydrocarbons into propane, butane, ethane and stable gas condensate, serves as part of INK's 10-year gas development programme running until 2024. It is due to come on stream in 2021.
INK operates fields across Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and Yakutia. To date it has focused largely on oil development, flowing over 170,000 b/d last year. It has struggled to monetise its gas resources because of limited infrastructure and weak local demand.
Under its gas development programme, INK has already commissioned a 1.3bn m3/yr gas treatment plant at the Yaraktinskoye field north of Lake Baikal. It aims to have three more such facilities up and running by the end of this year at Yaraktinskoye and the nearby Markovskoye field, raising processing capacity to almost 7.9bn m3/yr. These plants will provide feedstock for the Ust-Kut fractionation unit. At a later stage INK also plans to develop petrochemicals from its gas resources.
The overall cost of the programme is estimated at rubles 450bn ($7bn). While INK has found ways of making use of impurities found in its gas, its options are limited for commercialising the methane itself, other than selling it to Gazprom. It signed a memorandum with the Russian state company in October on co-operation in the exploration, production, transportation, processing and sale of oil and gas at two fields in Krasnoyarsk.