Lukoil planning to bring pace of decrease of oil production in W. Siberia down to 2.2%
MOSCOW. April 30 (Interfax) - Lukoil intends to continue decreasing the rate at which oil production is falling in West Siberia in 2019.
"Oil production fell by as much as 9% in West Siberia until 2016. In 2017, it fell 5.8%, and in 2018 3.7%. This year, we're planning 2.2%," head of Lukoil-Engineering Vadim Voyevodkin said at a press conference.
"This is work that we performed steadily on technology, on decreasing water production, on measures to get additional production," Voyevodkin said.
"Of course, we'd like for there to be certain movements in terms of tax preferences, because the 96% water cut of products says in and of itself that a different approach is required, these aren't new fields," he said.
Voyevodkin also said that by using techniques to increase reservoir recovery, the company gets additional production of about 25-26% of the total, or 21.5 million tonnes a year. Sidetrack drilling at existing wells has also caught on at the company, he said. "We get pretty serious production from this. In 2018, we drilled more than 230 sidetracks. This was a little less than in 2017, but production was 31% higher - more than 600,000 tonnes, compared with 480,000 in 2017. This technique is used most actively at Lukoil-West Siberia, where we're solving the issue of decreasing the rate at which production is falling," he said.
In 2018, Lukoil-West Siberia produced 35 million tonnes of oil.