Russia’s Gazprom has apparently rejected sharing its resources on the Yamal Peninsula with domestic rival Novatek.
The state-owned giant recently announced it had signed a memorandum of intent (MoI) with RusGazDobycha, a subsidiary of National Chemical Group (NCG). The two firms will study the prospects of creating a joint venture to develop three of the four fields in Gazprom’s Tambey cluster in Yamal Nenets.
Novatek aims to use resources from the Tambey field group to support an expansion of its LNG export capacity in the region. Gazprom repeatedly spurned a partnership with Novatek, however, prompting the latter’s CEO Leonid Mikhelson to ask Putin to support the company’s bid late last year.
Gazprom bought subsoil rights to the North-Tambeyskoye, West-Tambeyskoye, Tasiyskoye and Malyginskoye fields in 2008 for US$178 million without an auction. According to Miller, the firm has performed 2650 of seismic surveying and has drilled 14 wells at the site since then. Gazprom now believes that the four fields contain 6.7 trillion m3 of natural gas under Russia’s A, B, C1, C2 and C3 reserves classification system.
It plans to submit fresh data to Russia’s Federal Agency for Subsoil Use (Rosnedra) by 2018. This may lead to the agency to upgrade its own resource estimate, which currently stands at 2.65 trillion m3.