Oil production at Banzhenov Suite to top 80 mln tonnes by 2030 - Rosnedra
MOSCOW. Sept 20 (Interfax) - The central commission for development at Subsurface Resources Agency (Rosnedra) considers - based on oil-company data - that oil production at deposits in the Bazhenov Suite could exceed 83.5 million tonnes by 2030, the center's deputy chief, Valentin Shelepov said at the symposium Theory and Practice in the Application of Methods to Increase the Oil-production of Strata.
At present, oil extraction from Bazhenov Suite deposits amounts to around 400,000 tonnes, of which Lukoil subsidiary Russian Innovative Fuel and Energy Company (RITEK) accounts for some 100,000 tonnes.
Potential additional production at the suite by 2015 is estimated at 1.1 million tonnes, by 2020 - 15.4 million tonnes, and by 2025 - 51.5 million tonnes.
Shelepov noted that the suite's strata are located in Western Siberian lowlands over an area of around 1 million square kilometers. Resources are estimated to run from 100 billion to 170 billion tonnes of oil. "But no one has been able to calculate the geological resources of the Bazhenov Suite properly," he said.
Methods for producing oil there are extremely imperfect today, and the raw resource presents itself as kerogen with organic-matter content of over 83%, he said. "In order to get oil from this, we need to either wait millions of years, or apply methods that increase temperature and pressure, Shelepov said.
The head of Lukoil's department for increasing strata oil production, Nikolai Veremko, has said that current technologies for developing Bazhenov Suite oil do not allow for extracting large volumes of it. From each cubic meter of kerogen - after special heat-treatment - only 80 liters of oil are obtained. The temperature at which this process takes place is more than 300 degrees Celsius.
"We have prepared a pilot project for similar work. In the context of this project it is shown that, under the effect of heat, around 80 liters of oil is processed and trickles out of one cubic meter of light fraction of kerogen, but that is at a temperature of more than three hundred degrees," Veremko said.
The drilling of the first wells under this pilot project is planned for the end of this year or beginning of next, Veremko said. Horizontal drilling will be used.
The Duma of Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous District has sent the Russian government a letter requesting breaks for oil companies opening up Bazhenov Suite production, Veremko said. "However, no response has come from the government so far," he said. Providing breaks for such oil is quite difficult, though, as it is hard to distinguish it from light Western Siberian oil on the basis of its characteristics, he pointed out.