Russian military blocks Barents drilling
The Russian Ministry of Defence refuses to give oil company Rosneft access to fields in the Barents Sea.
A source in the Russian Mineral Extraction Agency (Rosnedra) confirms that Rosneft has got three bids for field licenses turned down because of objections from the Ministry of Defence.
According to Izvestia, Rosneft wanted to start exploration of the structures Severny, Papaninsky and Mezhdusharsky Vostochny in the Barents Sea.
All the fields are located southwest of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The Severny structure has an estimated 3,3 billion tons of oil equivalents, while the Mezhdusharsky Vostochny has 280 million tons and the Papaninsky – 75 million tons, Newsru.com reports.
In addition, Rosneft was disallowed to explore also the Severo-Barentsevoye field, because of ongoing state mapping of the area.
Problems connected with field exploration in the Russian part of the Barents Sea are far from new, Izvestia informs. Although the fields were discovered already in the 1970s, the Russian state has not managed to decide about their development primarily because of conflicting interests between different management authorities.
The Barents Sea is considered of key strategic interest for the Russian military because of its easy and ice-free access to the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. The powerful Northern Fleet is based on the Kola Peninsula and has its bases on the Barents Sea coast.
A number of regional hydrocarbon projects are in the pipeline, among them the Shtokman gas field. Mapping and exploration of the area is expected to pick pace after Russia and Norway in July 2011 finalized the delimitation of the Barents Sea waters. As BarentsObserver has reported, Norwegian oil interests have already started seismic mapping of their part of the area, while Russia is expected to start in the summer of 2012.
