It would be nice, but . . . . . .
Posted by Heading Out on October 24, 2005 - 11:33pm
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: peak oil, russia, western siberia [list all tags]
Russian Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said Monday he would like to see both U.S. energy majors Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips in the consortium to develop a huge offshore natural gas field in the Barents Sea.Both companies - along with Norway's Norsk Hydro ASA, Norway's Statoil ASA and France's Total SA - are on a shortlist to develop OAO Gazprom's Shtokman field.
Well a quick check with the Megaprojects list we mentioned earlier gives only 5 fields between now and 2010 that will collectively by then only yield about 1 - 1.5 mbd These are Prirazlomnoye (Russia Siberia) 155,000 now, 610,000 in 2010; Sakhalin I (Russian Far East) 250,000 in 2006; Sakhalin 2 (Russian Far East) 120,000 in 2007; Vankorskoye (Russia Siberia) 216,000 by 2010; and Uvatskoye (Russia Siberia) 200,000.
Well it would be nice to see that extra production from Russia, but it must be remembered that Russia is much like the United States in that a lot of the oil has now been developed and produced, and it has to be considered a set of very mature fields. As such many of the larger fields are in terminal depletion Romashkino and Samotlor coming immediately to mind). Without finding another one of those - the odds on which are miniscule, and the time line for development of which would likely be at least 7 years - it does not seem likely that the Russian government will be able to meet the new targets. Further, since many of the Russian fields use concurrent water flood with primary production, this led to the high depletion rates for both of the above fields, once they reached peak production. This, in turn, would suggest that the new developments that Chris Skrebowski has listed will, if anything only partially mitigate what will potentially be another producing country in decline before long.




k Nation (Jim Kunstler)






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