Russia's drilling rates will remain high; oil production will not drop substantially

摘要

Despite the overall favorable pricing environment in 2008, the Russian oil production and oilfield services sector has still failed to reverse the trends of the past two to three years. Cumulative oil and gas condensate production in Russia over the past three years has grown a little more than 2% annually, finishing the year at 488.5 million tonnes per annum (mtpa), a decrease of 2.8 million tonnes from 2007, Fig. 1. Oil production companies were involved in large-scale investments to acquire various assets in Russia and abroad, while paying less attention to the exploration and development of new oil fields and deposits. These factors affected conditions in 2008, when newly commissioned oil projects could not compensate for production losses in the main oil fields.