RusEnergy

MOSCOW, May 12 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's overall hydrocarbon resources equal 251.6 billion of oil equivalent, with established reserves amounting to 89.4 billion tons. Speaking at a government meeting on Thursday, Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said that "most of the established reserves are located on land... in West and East Siberia and in the European part of the country." Before 1992, oil and gas rehabilitation on the country's mainland exceeded production, but in 1990-1995 rehabilitation volumes plunged due to a reduction in geological exploration work, he said. Since the late 1980s, the country has been facing a significant reduction in exploration drilling and seismic exploration, the minister added. A certain increase in geological exploration that began in the late 1990s showed that Russia's continental part still had a certain hydrocarbon potential. "But the number and quality of discovered fields do not meet the demands of the country's economy," he underlined. He said that over 75% of oil and gas fields on land were being developed. The average exhaustion of deposits is nearing 50%, while average resources of discovered onshore fields are five times lower than in 1975. As a result, a lack of high-quality hydrocarbon fields is increasing, which means that by 2015 cost-effective oil reserves may be exhausted, he said. Trutnev spoke in favor of developing new fields. The most promising way to recover hydrocarbon reserves, in his opinion, is to develop the Russian shelf, which has huge oil and gas resources. Yet the number of fields discovered there is small. Most of discovered shelf fields are situated in the Barents and Kara Seas, as well as in the Okhotsk Sea, on the Sakhalin shelf. These are such gigantic gas fields as Shtokman, Rusanovskoye and Leningradskoye in the West Arctic and the largest oil fields on the northeastern shelf of Sakhalin.