First step towards Arctic shelf for Lukoil
The company secures additional access to the Russian Arctic coast as it wins the license to the East Taimyr oil field.
The license in question is located on the northern tip of Taimyr, the peninsula located between the Kara and Laptev Seas, and was obtained by Lukoil for a total of 1,9 billion rubles (€26 million). That was 600 times higher than the tender starting price set by the Russian Natural Resource Ministry, newspaper Kommersant reports.
Lukoil wins the license in competition with Rosneft, the state-owned company which holds a great number of licenses in the nearby Kara Sea.
The oil company, the second biggest in Russia, sees the East Taimyr license as a possible stepping stone towards offshore Arctic engagement. It is believed that the company which gets hold of the license will have major chances to obtain also other and much richer deposits in nearby waters.
Lukoil expects the Russian government to grant permission to offshore Arctic engagements already in the course of fall this year, Kommersant writes. Currently, only Gazprom and Rosneft are allowed to hold licesens in the area.
As previously reported, Lukoil might also chose to connect the connect the East Taimyr license areas with a coastal terminal as it has successfully developed in Varandey on the coast of the Pechora Sea. In Varandey, several million tons of tons of oil, all of it extracted from the Timan-Pechora province, is annually exported out through Arctic waters.
