Energy Minister Alexander Novak took part in a panel discussion on removing obstacles to steady energy supplies.
Asked about the promotion of difficult oil extraction, Mr Novak said that the main feature of difficult to recover resources is the unprofitability of their extraction given the present technology and tax rates. Drillers introduce expensive high technology to obtain more oil, so its cost skyrockets.
It is, however, necessary to mine difficult oil because other, more accessible deposits are becoming exhausted. There are government and corporate means of promoting difficult oil extraction through soft taxation, pilot projects, and high technology.
A bill submitted to the State Duma a few days ago envisages a Mineral Extraction Tax reduction for hard to recover resources, and fixes decreasing coefficients for calculating it, the Minister said.
He spoke about Russian plans to increase the output of liquefied natural gas. The demand for this has outstripped the demand for pipe gas within this decade, and is likely to grow further thanks to Asia and the developing markets.
As LNG is becoming ever more popular, the number of liquefying and regasifying installations is growing worldwide. It has doubled since 2000. However, the number of LNG supplier countries remains unchanged. There were just 19 last year. Russia has only one such plant, on Sakhalin Island, and accounts for 4% of the global LNG output.
Leading Russian gas mining companies intend to build LNG plants. Novatec and Total’s Yamal LNG programme, Gazprom’s Vladivostok LNG and Rosneft’s Sakhalin LNG are the most thoroughly developed of all. If implemented, they will increase Russian LNG production to 35-40 million tonnes by 2018-2020, to make up 10% of the global supply. Though the companies are ready to launch the projects in theory, there are many organisational problems to address, Mr Novak said.
Source: Ministry of Energy
