MOSCOW, September 30 (RIA Novosti), Stanislav Fisher - Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin is a very lucky man. His company has found a huge oilfield in the Kara Sea, just in time before its partner, Exxon Mobil, is forced by the US government to cease cooperation with Rosneft.
Now, Sechin will have no shortage of companies willing to get involved in extracting the 900 billion dollars worth of oil from the field he named “Victory”.
“This is our united victory, it was achieved thanks to our friends and partners from ExxonMobil, Nord Atlantic Drilling, Schlumberger, Halliburton, Weatherford, Baker, Trendsetter, FMC, said Sechin.
Exxon Mobil will not be able to participate in further drilling and exploratory operations. This will likely slow down Rosneft's plans in the region, however critics have no real reason to cheer. Actually Exxon carried out the hard and expensive part. The American company helped Sechin prove that there are massive oil resources in the Russian Arctic ready for extraction. Exxon found a massive oil field with its first exploratory drilling and is now forced to step away, receiving nothing from the find, while Rosneft will be looking for other partners willing and able to join the project. It has been speculated that the most advanced technologies for the deep-water Arctic are unavailable in Russia. However, even if it may be true, given the money at stake it is safe to assume that any kind of top-of-the-line technology will soon become available to Russian oil and gas giants.
While Exxon's departure is likely to slow down the process, it is by no means a lethal blow to the Russian energy giant's Arctic ambitions. According to Larissa Kalanda, Rosneft VP, the company has a plan B:
“If the regulators didn't allow Exxon to work on the well, Rosneft had a backup plan and was ready to continue working on its own”, she told Russian media.
Russia's deputy minister of energy, Kirill Molotsov was more specific, stating that Russia has platforms capable of drilling in the Arctic and one of those platforms “Arkticheskaya” was built last year. “We have eight purely Russian platforms all in all”, he added.
Despite rumors about significant financial difficulties spread by the Western media, Rosneft appears to be strong and ready to expand its presence in the Arctic while maintaining its policy of paying significant dividends to its shareholders.
Rosneft CEO says maintaining dividends is a "sacred obligation" for the Russian oil giant: http://t.co/BWn85NlqdJ
— Bloomberg News (@BloombergNews) September 29, 2014
It seems that Sechin's policy of investing in exploration is paying off. If the new discoveries in the Kara Sea are as big as the most recent one, Rosneft will have no shortage of oil and money for the next few decades.
