Russia has run out of modern oil production technologies

Energy Minister Alexander Novak upset President Vladimir Putin.
30.03.2018
Origin source
Russian oil companies, in accordance with the wishes of the Kremlin, digitized and connected artificial intelligence to one of the wells, but this did not add to modern mining technologies.

Fracturing technologies that are actively used in the US allow sharply to increase the return from wells, "revive" old fields and extract hard-to-reach oil from shale rock, Russia is not available at the moment, said at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, Energy Minister Alexander Novak.

"Fracture fleets <...> are increasingly used today in the development of oil and gas fields.In Russia today, unfortunately, there are no such technologies, and only an experimental industrial installation has been created," Novak said.

Work is underway to create two more installations, but they will also be "operated as experimental," he added.

Far more progress was made in digitalization: Gazprom Neft fully digitized the field in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug. "The so-called" smart deposit ", within which artificial intelligence makes decisions about the most high-quality extraction of oil," he said (citations on the Kremlin website). The Ministry of Energy, according to Novak, aims to develop import substitution, and by 2020 to achieve that to replace domestic 80% of foreign technology.

After the introduction of the sanctions of the West, the technological base of the Russian extractive industry completely stopped in development: the share of fundamentally new developments fell from 30% in 2011 to 0% - in 2016, says Deputy Director of the Center for Development of the Higher School of Economics Valery Mironov.

The role of companies' and state's spending on science and innovation (about 1% of the world's) has played a role, and it's clear that the situation looks unacceptable, Mironov continues: the oil recovery factor (CIP) for the fields being developed in Russia is on the average about 25% (in the world leaders have up to 45%.

Russia's ability to increase oil production with the current technological base is almost exhausted, the International Energy Agency predicts in the report Oil 2018. According to the calculations of the IEA, the peak of production of 11.74 million barrels per day Russia will show in 2021, after which the volumes will begin to fall.

Officials

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