Russia's oilfield services industry must work with metal, microelectronics cos to achieve technological sovereignty - expert

ST. PETERSBURG. June 10 (Interfax) - Russia's oilfield services industry needs to accelerate cooperation with metal and microelectronics manufacturers in order to achieve technological independence, said the president of the new owner of Baker Hughes' former Russian assets, OFS Technologies, David Gadzhimirzayev.

"In order to accelerate and scale, it is necessary to have a presence in cross-industry collaboration. I'm talking now about metallurgy, about companies that make electronics, in order to be technologically independent and develop all the necessary resources on the territory of the Russian Federation," Gadzhimirzayev said at the energy panel discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Russia needs to develop its own oilfield service technologies because it is moving toward increasing extraction of hard-to-recover reserves, he said, remarking that the share of such reserves in Russian oil output is forecast to grow to 70% by 2050 from about 30% at present.

"We need to invest in high-tech equipment. The country has all the resources for this, that's the most important thing," Gadzhimirzayev said.

He recalled that OFS Technologies is carrying out a project to manufacture domestic rotary steerable systems. "By 2025-2026 we will produce completely domestic equipment that will fill a need in the development of hard-to-recover reserves, in complex drilling of horizontal wells," Gadzhimirzayev said.

OFS Technologies is a Russian oilfield services company that includes enterprises in 11 Russian regions, including the Tyumen Oilfield Equipment Plant. These assets previously belonged to U.S. company Baker Hughes , which sold them to a group of its Russian senior executives at the end of 2022.