Gazprom Neft starts up Siberian field
Russian oil firm Gazprom Neft has brought on stream the Tazovskoye oil and gas field in west Siberia, the company announced on June 17.
The field's infrastructure was completed under severe COVID-19 restrictions, Gazprom Neft said, with the company having to use remote work, drones and digital technologies to minimise risks.
Tazovskoye contains 419mn metric tons of oil and 225bn m3 of gas. It will form the centre of a new production cluster, which also comprises the Meretoyakhinskoye and Severo-Samburgskoye fields, and the two Zapadno-Yubileiny blocks. The cluster's overall resources total 1.1bn mt of oil and 492bn m3 of gas.
Gazprom Neft was previously hoping to partner with Shell to develop Tazovskoye and the fields surrounding it, but the Anglo-Dutch major withdrew from the plan in April last year, citing a "challenging external environment" created by the pandemic.
The oil arm of state-owned Gazprom said it intended to invest more than 150bn rubles ($2.1bn) in the Tazovskoye project over the next 10 years. The company also revealed plans at its annual general meeting on June 16 to invest as much as 500bn rubles in extracting oil at Gazprom's Bovanenkovo and Kharasaveyskoye gas deposits on the Yamal Peninsula.
Under risk-service agreements reached in 2018, Gazprom Neft has been targeting oil structures at its parent company's gas fields across Russia, to maximise overall recovery.