The CEO of Russia’s biggest oil producer Rosneft, Igor Sechin, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, with the development of the Russian Arctic shipping route being high on the agenda, Bellona reports.
The powerful company leader assured Putin that the unprecedented boost in cargo volumes laid out in the president’s May Decree from last year is achievable.
“We are now looking at the possibility to create an Arctic cluster that will fully meet the objective to reach an annual 80 million tons of goods on the Northern Sea Route by year 2024,” Sechin said.
The projected cluster will include an oil pipeline between the Vankor oil fields and the Arctic coast. According to Sechin, the projected cluster will be ready by 2024 and six years later, in 2030, up to 100 million tons of oil will have been pipelined out of the area.
“It will be on the basis of our own existing and future projects in the Arctic region, including the fields of Vankor, Suzun, Tagul and Lodochnoye,” Sechin told the president. He also made clear that the new cluster will include several of the company’s planned projects in the Taymyr area, including the major field recently discovered in the Khatanga area.
In late 2017, Rosneft announced that it had found at least 80 million tons of oil in the Tsentralno-Olginskaya-1 well. The resources are located partly offshore in the Laptev Sea, partly in the eastern part of the Taymyr Peninsula.
Sechin also indicated that his company’s projected new Arctic hub could include the Yermak field, a project developed together with British energy giant BP.
