18 October 2013, News Wires – Russia is best placed to help meeting the world’s rising energy demands by tapping the “huge potential” of the Russian Far East and Arctic, Rosneft president Igor Sechin said.
Speaking to the World Energy Congress in the South Korean city of Daegu, Sechin said that Russian was creating new opportunities by incentivizing hard-to-reach resources while other countries faced significant challenges to energy expansion.
Sechin said the US has restrictions on crude oil exports, West Africa suffers from a lack of engineering resources, Europe faces falling production, and the Middle East must deal with an unstable political situation that has persisted over recent years.
He said that concerns about energy supply in emerging economies were “skyrocketing” as global energy consumption continued to rise overall.
Russia is in an “excellent position to help meet the world’s energy demands” and “make a considerable contribution to energy security”, he said.
Last month, Russia introduced tax breaks to encourage oil firms to explore hard-to-reach undersea fields, as part of a bid to tap into new reserves.
Rosneft is eyeing projects in the Far East and the Arctic, Sechin said, with offshore projects, offering “huge potential” for increasing the resource base and offsetting declining production in mature fields.
He said that investment, technology and equipment were “prerequisites” for frontier exploration, adding that the Russian giant advocated long-term co-operative relations with partners including Asia-Pacific players.
Sechin highlighted Rosneft and ExxonMobil’s joint LNG plant being developed in Russia’s Far East.
The first section of the five-million-tonne-capacity Sakhalin plant is set to be completed by 2018 at the latest, he said.
Two new shipyards are also planned, and the company is preparing to engage in shipbuilding, the Rosneft boss said.
– Upstream