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GAIA Host Collective
Oil production growth slows in Russia
Oil production growth in Russia has dropped 2.5-fold this year compared with 2004, though the country remains the leading oil exporter outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the International Energy Agency said in its report published on Tuesday.
By preliminary estimates, Russia's oil production stood at 9.8 million barrels a day last month, 70,000 barrels a day more than in August.
Russia's oil output this year is expected to be 250,000 to 300,000 barrels a day more than in 2004. Growth is expected to remain at the same level in 2006. But IEA experts say oil production will be growing much slower over the next two years compared with last year, when oil output climbed by 740,000 barrels a day.
http://top.rbc.ru/english/index.shtml?/news/english/2005/10/12/12114708_bod.shtml
I have heard (from a Russian) that the limiting factor in Russian world-production is not so much pumps as pipelines. This would be clearly evident if Russian market oil prices were much lower than world prices. Does anybody know what that Russian price is?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_47/b3909079_mz054.htm
This article is more upbeat on near term Russian oil production than some of the articles I have seen.
http://www.mosnews.com/money/2005/10/03/oilspecialreport.shtml
This is recent and somewhat pessimistic.
http://newsfromrussia.com/main/2005/09/20/63296.html
There is a pipeline monopoly!
"oil shipments via the trunk pipelines of state monopoly Transneft"
First, the Russian economy is littered with inefficiencies, ranging from a bureaucracy larger than the Soviet one, to incredible corruption at all levels, to a myriad of monopolies. Putin has not made it a priority to make things more efficient.
Second, there are many more likely causes. The actual thing that got Yukos was the accusation that it had not paid its taxes. Many, probably every Russian company and person, did not pay their full taxes at some time during the 90's. Not only was it selectively persecuted but the courts also froze all of the company's assets, effectively preventing it from paying off the taxes without selling off part of the company. There was definitely an ulterior motive. That motive could have been to block it from being bought out by Exxon (I believe?), or to create a huge Russian oil-block (under government control), or to remove someone who Putin saw as a political threat.
Whatever the motive, the persecution has succeeded in accomplishing all three of those, while not provably making the Russian oil sector any more efficient, which is why I doubt that was the cause.