Rosneft offloads stake in key West Siberian JV
Russia's biggest oil producer Rosneft has offloaded its 50% stake in Tomskneft, an upstream join venture it had with Gazprom Neft, the company said in a mandatory public disclosure on September 3, without disclosing the identity of the new owner, or a sales price.
Rosneft is rationalising its upstream operations in Russia, having shed its interests in a number of non-core, mostly mature assets over the last year. It is seeking to raise funds to develop a cluster of large greenfields in the Russian Arctic, collectively known as the Vostok Oil project. Some of these divested assets were acquired by private company Neftegazholding.
Tomskneft controls 34 mostly mature oil and gas fields in the Tomsk region. According to Wood Mackenzie, around 60% of its oil output comes from Igolsko-Talovoye, Krapivinskoye, Luginetskoye, Pervomaiskoye, Sovetskoye and Vakhskoye, and most of this supply is processed at the company's refinery in Achinsk.
Tomskneft was one of the Rosneft units that bore the brunt of the company's OPEC+ cuts, with production dropping 36% in 2020 to 5.18mn metric tons, from 8mn mt in the previous year. Tomskneft also flowed 2bn m3 of natural gas in 2019.
The fall in output, as well as weaker prices, resulted in Tomskneft's revenues halving last year. It booked a net loss of 6.3bn ruble ($86mn) loss for the year, versus a 16.2bn ruble profit a year earlier.
Tomskneft was used to be owned by Yukos, Russia's former largest oil company that was hit with $27bn in back-tax claims in 2003 and subsequently broken up. Rosneft acquired Tomskneft in 2007 at an auction, and sold a 50% interest to Gazprom Neft later that year.
Vostok Oil is Rosneft's main focus, comprising several large oil and gas fields in the north of the Krasnoyarsk region that the company estimates could one day flow 2mn barrels/day of oil and 50mn metric tons/year of LNG. Rosneft closed the sale of a 10% interest in Vostok Oil to commodities trader Trafigura in December last year, and has agreed terms to sell a further 5% to fellow traders Vitol and Mercantile & Maritime.