A working meeting was held between Rosneft Chief Executive Officer Igor Sechin, and Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs of India Hardeep Singh Puri.
The meeting discussions covered implementation of joint projects, development of cooperation in the area of oil and gas production, refining and petrochemicals, sales of hydrocarbons.
Rosneft and the Indian partners actively develop the format of integral cooperation throughout the value chain, from oil production to refining and marketing of petroleum products. The projects they jointly develop in Russia include the Vankorneft, Taas-Yuryakh Neftegazodobycha, and Sakhalin-1 production assets.
Then, Rosneft is a shareholder of Nayara Energy, the company operating a complex refinery in Vadinar and one of most rapidly developing retail networks in India. The Indian company has already started implementation of the Refinery Upgrade Program: Stage 1 envisages installation of polypropylene production plants for up to 450 thousand tons per annum. Nayara Energy also plans to further expand its retail network in India to 8 thousand outlets in the next 3 years.
"These projects allowed us to take the lead in the investment cooperation between Russia and India, Igor Sechin noted at the meeting. - Mutual investments into projects with engagement of Rosneft and the Indian partners exceed 17 billion dollars. This accounts for more than half of cumulative Russia-Indian investments to date."
The meeting also included a presentation of Vostok Oil, Rosneft's flagship project implemented in North Krasnoyarsk Territory. Igor Sechin took Hardeep Singh Puri through key parameters of the project and its competitive strengths.
Vostok Oil is one of the most promising petroleum projects in the world. It comprises 52 license areas with 13 oil and gas fields located within their boundaries, including those developed with participation of the Indian partners: Vankor, Suzun, Tagul, and Lodochnoe fields, and also some new promising and unique in terms of their reserves fields: Payakhskoe and Zapadno-Irkinskoe.
The resource base of the project exceeds 6 billion tons of premium-quality sweet crude notable for its extraordinary low sulfur content of 0.01-0.04%. The high quality of raw products makes it unnecessary to install certain plants at refineries thus allowing to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions of the project. The Vostok Oil carbon footprint makes up 25% vs traditional parameters characteristic of major petroleum projects.
The project production is expected to amount to the tune of 115 million tons of oil by 2033. Vostok Oil has a logistical advantage of supplying raw products produced at its fields in two directions at once, to European and Asian markets.
An important factor contributing to the attractiveness of Vostok Oil is the availability of a unique sustainable economic model of the project. Rosneft has already obtained conclusions of leading international experts confirming the resource base, reservoir engineering methods and economics of the project. Analysts of top investment banks (Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse among them) note a high profitability level of the project.