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April 5th, 2006:

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Cnooc Taps Gas Field That Is Part of Dispute With Japan

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
April 6, 2006
SINGAPORE — China's biggest offshore oil-and-gas producer, Cnooc Ltd., has quietly started pumping natural gas ahead of schedule from a field that is part of a continuing border dispute with Japan, a person familiar with the situation said.
State-owned Cnooc began production at the Chunxiao field Jan. 28, the person said. This occurred just as another round of sensitive talks on China's longstanding border dispute with Japan was to be held — and only a day after a company spokesman said production would be delayed until later in the first half of this year. The person said Cnooc didn't announce that it had begun production to keep from undermining the talks.
The revelation comes as relations between Asia's two biggest economic powers continue to falter. Earlier this week, Japan rejected an offer by Chinese President Hu Jintao to hold a summit, the Chinese foreign ministry said. Tokyo said the offer was conditional on Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's moving to halt visits to a contentious war shrine, a demand Japan has rebuffed.
Last year, simmering Chinese resentment over the countries' wartime history spilled over into massive anti-Japanese protests, which threatened the two countries' business links. China alleges that Japan has failed to acknowledge atrocities it committed during its invasion and occupation of China up to the end of World War II. Beijing has worked to block Japan's campaign for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
As China's economy grows and its own domestic supplies of oil and gas dwindle, it is increasingly competing with Japan for scarce energy resources, such as oil from Russia or natural gas from Australia. Japan is entirely dependent on imports for oil and gas.
The gas fields lie in the East China Sea, which separates China's eastern coast and Japan's southern island chain of Okinawa. The fields lie near what Japan says is the median line between the two countries' 370-kilometer exclusive economic zones. These give a country sole rights to resources, such as fish and minerals. Japan accepts that the Chinese drilling is taking place in Chinese waters, but it is concerned the drilling might suck natural gas out of deposits on the Japanese side of the line.
China doesn't officially recognize the midway line and says its exclusive economic zone includes areas to the east of it. Responding to a question about the start-up of production, an official from the spokesman's office of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that he didn't know the specifics. But he said generally that “China's natural-gas development is totally within coastal waters which are not under dispute with Japan.”
A spokesman for the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said he has no comment because the ministry hasn't confirmed that actual production has started. He said the overall gas-field dispute “should be resolved through negotiations, not through unilateral actions.”
Japan refers to the gas field by the name Shirakaba.
A Cnooc official said Chunxiao is ready for operations, but the official couldn't comment on whether production had already started.
Write to Dow Jones Newswires editors at [email protected] read more

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Reuters: No return to abandoned Nigerian oilfields: source

Wed Apr 5, 2006 6:15 AM ET
LAGOS (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L: Quote, Profile, Research) and other companies have no plans to return their staff to abandoned oilfields in Nigeria's southern delta until there is a truce with militants, industry sources said on Wednesday.
Nigerian Minister of State for Petroleum Edmund Daukoru said on Monday that Shell would resume production from its abandoned EA oilfield within days, but the company has made no official response.
Militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta have waged a four-month campaign of kidnapping and sabotage against the world's eighth largest oil exporter which has cut supplies by a quarter.
They have threatened more attacks.
“The federal government must give us an assurance that the threat no longer exists and also hear from the militant side that that is correct,” an oil industry source said, asking not to be named.
“Anything short of that would be taking an uncalculated risk with our staff,” he added, noting that militants engaged troops in a gun battle in the delta on Thursday last week.
A Shell spokeswoman in London said: “We will return to the areas when it is safe to do so and there's nothing known in terms of timing.”
Oil industry sources said a meeting between the government and delta groups scheduled for later on Wednesday was unlikely to achieve anything because key players from the militant side would be absent.
Prominent Niger Delta activists have called for a boycott of Wednesday's meeting with the government on the grounds that it was poorly conceived and unlikely to produce tangible results in terms of development of the remote wetlands region. read more

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NEWS24.com (South Africa): Oil spill upsets Nigerians: Nigerians panic after spill

05/04/2006 13:05 – (SA)
Lagos – A minority rights group fighting environmental pollution in Nigeria's delta region on Wednesday reported an oil spill from a damaged pipeline owned by Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell.
Community unrest forced Shell to quit oil production in Ogoniland in 1993 but the area is still dotted with crude oil supply pipelines belonging to the company.
“The oil spill occurred on Sunday, and since then about 10 000 barrels of crude must have been spilled into the environment,” Ledum Mitee, president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (Mosop), told AFP.
“Crude oil is flowing into the swamps, polluting streams and rivers and endangering the lives of the people,” he said.
He said the latest spill, which had been reported to Shell, had affected two Ogoni communities – Dio and Dere – and might spread to other areas if it was not soon contained.
Shell could not immediately confirm if the spill was fresh or one previously reported to the company last month.
Mosop was founded in 1990 by late rights activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, executed in November 1995 by the military on trumped-up murder charges.
The group is seeking compensation from oil majors, particularly Royal/Dutch Shell, for environmental pollution in the Niger delta from years of exploration in the region.
The Nigerian government has set up a peace committee to mediate. Mitee said it was a good idea and hoped the dispute could be “amicably resolved.”
He said any Shell return to Ogoniland would be decided after the committee has concluded its work, adding that for the initiative to succeed all sides – including Shell International and the Nigerian federal government – should be represented on it.
Shell is Nigeria's major operator, accounting for around half of the West African country's daily output of 2.6 million barrels. read more

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BLOOMBERG: Crude Oil Rebounds on Concern About Nigerian Oil-Supply Delay

April 5 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil rebounded, after falling earlier today, on concern it will take Royal Dutch Shell Plc and some other companies longer than expected to restore output in Nigeria amid attacks by militants.
Crude oil for May delivery rose 5 cents, or 0.1 percent, to $66.28 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 11:36 a.m. London time. The contract earlier fell as much as 49 cents, or 0.7 percent, to $65.74 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading. Prices today are 17 percent higher than a year ago.
Brent crude oil for May settlement rose 18 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $66.57 a barrel on London's ICE Futures exchange.
“There is nervousness around,'' said Kevin Blemkin, a broker with Man Financial Plc in London. “The market is still in the bull phase.''
Nigerian Oil Minister Edmund Daukoru said on April 3 that Shell's Nigerian venture may resume production soon at an offshore field closed since February because of attacks by militants in the Niger delta. Unrest in February and March halted production of 630,000 barrels of oil a day, more than 25 percent of Nigeria's daily production.
Larry Osai, a spokesman for Shell's offshore venture in Nigeria, declined to comment on April 3 about when the field would reopen.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Eduard Gismatullin in London at [email protected] read more

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Charleston Gazette: Grant landowners to argue against proposed wind farm

April 05, 2006
Grant County property owners will appear at the Mineral County Courthouse in Keyser today to argue against a 400-foot-tall windpower project NedPower/Shell plans to build at Mount Storm.
Former Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely will represent seven local landowners in arguments before Judge Phillip Jordan scheduled for early this afternoon.
Some of the proposed wind turbines would be built near local homes, subjecting residents to constant low frequency vibrations and flickering lights to warn aircraft from approaching those turbines.
“The eyes of the industry are on this case,” said Linda Cooper, president of Citizens for Responsible Wind Power, based in Morgantown.
“West Virginia’s rural residents, while surrounded by natural beauty and wonders, have enough challenges without a huge powerful industry moving in and forcing them to move out,” Cooper said. read more

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Post Independent (Colorado): Oil shale developers showcase technology at Rifle open house

Donna Gray
Post Independent Staff
April 5, 2006
RIFLE – Three companies hoping to move forward with their oil shale research, development and demonstration projects in the Piceance Basin showcased their technologies Tuesday in Rifle. Hosted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the companies – Shell, Chevron and EGL Resources – have fundamentals in common in their methods to produce oil from rock.
The BLM will review environmental assessments of the three projects before awarding the 160-acre leases in Rio Blanco County.
The goal, said Kent Walter, BLM Meeker field office manager, “is to make sure they are economically viable and environmentally sound.”
The research leases can be expanded to 5,120-acre commercial leases if the various oil shale extraction technologies prove workable. The companies have 10 years to prove up their methods.
All three plans involve heating the oil-bearing rock to a point where the oil or kerogen becomes liquefied and can be pumped out of the ground.
But the methods of heating differ.
EGL will use steam circulated around the wells in pipes to heat the rock and release the kerogen, said Gordon Harris, a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Wyoming, who is a consultant to the EGL project.
A similar process, called “steam flooding,” is used in the production of oil, except the steam is injected directly into the ground, Harris said.
“The challenge will be to make sure there is efficient heat transfer” between the enclosed steam and the rock, “so we can quickly raise the temperature of the oil shale,” he said. It takes from one to two years for heating to liquefy the kerogen.
The same steam-flooding technology is being used successfully in western Canada to extract oil from tar sands, Harris said.
Although also using an in-situ, or in place, method to extract oil, Chevron will fracture zones of oil shale using heated carbon dioxide and other chemicals that will raise the temperature of the rock.
Chevron will start with five injection/production wells on their plot, said senior engineer Mark Looney. He said that with certain chemicals added to the carbon dioxide it may be possible to liquefy kerogen at 300 degrees Fahrenheit rather than the usual 600 degrees.
“If we can retort (process) it at lower temperatures there will be less (harmful) environmental byproducts” produced, Looney said.
“We're approaching this slowly and methodically,” said Dan Johnson, manager of government and public affairs for Chevron. “There's a lot of work to be done.”
Shell has been testing its technology on land it owns in the Piceance Basin but wanted to expand to federal lands because the oil shale deposits are richer, said Shell spokeswoman Jill Davis. It has applied for three 160-acre contiguous plots. Since the plots are closer to the center of the basin than its private holdings, the oil shale is thicker and richer, Davis said.
Shell plans three separate tests on each of the three plots. One will combine all the technology it has researched since 1996 on its own land. Another will look at advanced heating technology, and a third will test extraction of nahcolite as well as oil shale. Nahcolite, or sodium bicarbonate, overlays the oil shale in much of the Piceance Basin and must also be developed if it occurs in the BLM leases.
The method it has been testing on its own land involves heating the rock with electrically powered heaters. Shell has said it is now able to recover 60 percent of the oil, which comes to the surface as diesel or jet-grade fuel, from the rock. “That's double the traditional recovery rate,” Davis said.

All three companies acknowledge ground water will be a problem, namely keeping it free of potentially harmful chemicals associated with oil shale production.
Exxon, which also applied for a 160-acre research plot, is no longer under consideration, Walter said. Exxon was a major developer of oil shale during the 1980s in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties. It was dropped by the BLM because according to its plan it would not be producing oil for eight years. It also applied for a 160-acre plot in what the BLM considers a “multimineral” zone containing both oil shale and nahcolite, both of which must be produced, Walter said.
“Their proposal was to develop the oil shale at the expense of the (nahcolite),” he said. “That's not consistent with our resource management plan” for the Piceance.
Walter said the environmental assessments for the three projects are set to be completed by the end of April, followed by a 30-day public comment period, and a final decision about awarding the leases is due in May or June. read more

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Wildcat Producer Sparks Oil Boom On Montana Plains

After Majors Pulled Out,
Mr. Findley Drilled Anew;
Size of Find Still Unclear
A Rival Counts Tanker Trucks
By JOHN J. FIALKA
April 5, 2006; Page A1

SIDNEY, Mont. — In the mid-1990s, major oil-exploration companies like Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Gulf Oil Co. and Texaco Co. were shutting down operations here on the remote high plains, abandoning hundreds of nonproducing wells and letting their leases to mineral rights lapse.
Federal and state agencies tracking exploration also considered the region a bust. “I thought my job was going to be turning out the lights,” says Jim Halvorson, geologist for Montana's Board of Oil and Gas Conservation. In 2000, his office predicted oil production would rapidly decline toward zero.
But Richard L. Findley, a graying geologist and “wildcat” producer, thought they were all wrong. He bought up leases on the cheap and helped spark a surprising boom in one of the most heavily explored oil regions in the country.
Mr. Findley discovered a new field that is now producing 48,000 barrels a day of high-quality crude oil from more than 300 wells. While oil companies have discovered bigger fields in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, this sizeable find is now the highest-producing onshore field found in the lower 48 states in the past 56 years, according to the U.S. Energy Department.
The high price of oil, coupled with the call to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, has sparked debate among policy makers, executives and entrepreneurs about just how much untapped oil is still out there in the continental U.S., where it is, and how to get it. Hurricane damage last summer to vast U.S. oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico heightened interest in onshore fields.
For several years now, major oil companies have taken the approach that there are no more large fields left to find under American soil. U.S. oil production has dropped from 9.2 million barrels a day in 1973 to about 5.4 million barrels today, and the country now imports 60% of its oil.
David F. Morehouse, senior geologist with the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, contends there is more new oil to be found in the continental U.S. Finding it, he says, will “depend on people doing the data analysis and, quite frankly, people going in and drilling enough in the right places.”
Mr. Findley, who is 54 years old, did just that. Now production in this part of eastern Montana is growing, and new investors are arriving to explore the potential. At least one midsized firm, Marathon Oil Co., has begun buying leases. Halliburton Co., the big Houston-based oil-services company, has invested with Mr. Findley. The state says the proven oil find in the area will likely be in the range of 150 million barrels, hardly what oil-patch hands call an “elephant,” but nevertheless boosting the nation's proven oil reserves by about 1%.
Some oil folks think there's even more around here. Drillers are finding evidence of a similarly sized field in western North Dakota. Geologists say both fields are part of a 200,000-square-mile formation known as the “Bakken,” which lies under parts of Montana, the Dakotas and Canada. No one yet knows how much oil can be extracted from it, but some estimates are sky-high. One federal geochemist who analyzed the formation estimated it contains 400 billion barrels of oil, while a North Dakota state geologist said 200 billion. If even the lower estimate is true, and if 10% can be recovered — a conservative rule of thumb used by geologists — the Bakken could eclipse Alaska's Prudhoe Bay as the largest recent U.S. oil find.
Staying Away
Thus far, the lofty predictions remain unproven, and skeptics remain. Most of the biggest oil companies are staying away. “Nobody has a good solid fix on this yet,” notes Mr. Morehouse, who says it will take more drilling to determine the true extent of the Bakken.
While many people associate big oil finds with big companies, over the years about 80% of the oil found in the U.S. has been brought in by wildcatters such as Mr. Findley, says Larry Nation, spokesman for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Wildcatters search for oil, nail down drilling rights, then seek money from banks or bigger companies to extract it.
Mr. Findley grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, the son of an accountant for a chain of grocery stores. A brother-in-law, a geologist, hired him as a field assistant to hunt for oil in west Texas. “I just fell in love with geology,” he recalls. He graduated from Texas A&M University in 1975 and got a job as a geologist with Tenneco Oil Co. In 1983 he left to found his own Montana-based consulting and exploration company, a one-man operation.
Three years later, world oil prices crashed, and fluctuating prices dogged Mr. Findley as he tried to stay in the business. In the 1990s, the majors left the area in the belief that it was played out. Mr. Findley felt there was more oil to be found and began putting together small exploration deals.
His income had dropped by more than half to $45,000 a year, and he wasn't sure how much longer that would last. “Many times, my wife and I sat down at the kitchen table and said, 'What are we going to do next?' We always came to the same conclusion. [Geology] is what I know. This is what I love. So we just kept going.”
Mr. Findley decided to scrutinize the Bakken formation, which consists of a thin layer of silt and broken rock sandwiched between two layers of oil-bearing shale. The majors had assumed that oil could be extracted from the shale, but after finding only modest amounts, they gave up.
Mr. Findley was interested in the middle layer they had ignored. The majors had figured this rocky layer was so tightly packed that whatever oil resided there could not be extracted economically. So they drilled right through it. Reviewing old drilling records, Mr. Findley concluded the “middle member” held an underground sea of high quality crude at least 50 miles long and 12 miles wide, which could be tapped using a different extraction technique.
With help from a real-estate agent named Bob Robinson, Mr. Findley quietly began buying drilling rights for thousands of acres. Mr. Findley figured that by drilling down the old holes and then injecting water and sand to make the rock layer more porous — a process called “fracking,” or fracturing — the trapped oil would be released. But the job was too big for his tiny company, which normally explored fields of 300 acres or less. This job involved at least 300 square miles.
Mr. Findley put together a partnership with Bobby B. Lyle, who heads Lyco Energy Corp., a small Dallas-based oil-exploration company. In exchange for financing and drilling expertise, Lyco received a 75% stake. Mr. Lyle says his company was so taken with Mr. Findley's theory that “none of us had thought much about what to do if it didn't work.”
It didn't work. After drilling down 10 old “dry holes,” Lyco found that the process was releasing oil, but not enough to justify the new drilling. In 1997, when oil dropped to $8 a barrel, the partners stopped drilling.
“We concluded that we were sitting on a lot of oil,” says Mr. Lyle, but that conventional vertical wells couldn't handle the job. “The question was: How do you extract it commercially?”
He approached Halliburton, which had expertise in a relatively new drilling technique called horizontal drilling. Using computer-controlled rigs and motorized, directional drill bits, Halliburton could drill 10,000 feet down, then maneuver the bit to work horizontally. Messrs. Findley and Lyle figured the process would allow a much bigger fracking operation. Halliburton decided to take a stake, which none of the partners will quantify.
Cash from the Halliburton deal allowed Lyco to buy drilling rights to more than 100,000 acres. In May 2000, drillers bored a 10,000-foot vertical well called Burning Tree State 36-2H. That May 26, a fleet of trucks carrying water, sand and diesel engines for fracking clustered around the drilling rig. Technicians, watching their laptops, turned the drill horizontally and waited for it to move across the rocky layer. After several hours, one of them flipped a switch and the oil began flowing up the pipe.
“We watched that well from April to December just to be sure this wasn't a fluke,” recalls Mr. Lyle, an engineer and former dean of Southern Methodist University's business school. Meanwhile, he was working out plans with Halliburton to drill more horizontal wells and to buy more drilling rights.
They weren't the only ones watching. Engineers from Headington Oil Co. LP, another small Dallas-based drilling company working in the area, had hired college students to count the tank trucks hauling oil from the well. Headington, which had arrived in Sidney in 1997, was also pondering records of the supposedly dry holes drilled by the majors. But Headington was drilling into a less productive field than Lyco's, and had had relatively little success.
When the big Lyco tanker-truck counts came in, Headington began buying more leases. New oil production in the region “had been dead for so long that we were able to keep prices very reasonable,” recalls Gary Polasek, a Headington geologist and technical manager.
Under Montana law, six months after the Burning Tree well began producing, Lyco had to disclose its methods to the state, which caused further scrambling at Headington. “When their first well came in, we felt we could improve upon it,” says Mr. Polasek. His company hired Schlumberger Ltd., Halliburton's major rival, to work out a way to tap the Bakken using horizontal drilling and fracking.
There are currently 225 rigs drilling for oil in North America, according to industry records. Twenty are drilling in the Sidney area and more are coming. Montana records show 13 oil companies drilling in the Bakken. “They're drilling [wells] as fast as 20 rigs can drill. We'll probably get 150 new wells a year at this rate, and there are very, very few dry holes,” says Tom Richmond, administrator for Montana's Board of Oil and Gas Conservation.
What's unusual about this boom, says Mr. Richmond, is that small companies like Headington and Lyco have most of the key acreage tied up in leases. “There's not a lot of room for other people to get involved,” he says. Still, “there are others trying to buy around the edges in hopes the play will get bigger yet.”
A 1999 study by Leigh C. Price, a highly regarded geochemist who worked for the Denver office of the United States Geological Survey, suggests that it might. Mr. Price examined 107 old wells in North Dakota and found evidence of unextracted oil in the broken-rock layer of all of them. He estimated that there were 413 billion barrels of high-quality crude to be found between the two layers of shale — right where Mr. Findley found it. But the study by Mr. Price, who died in 2002, was never published.
Julie LeFever, a geologist for the North Dakota Geological Survey, reviewed the same material used by Mr. Price. Taking a more conservative forecasting approach, she estimates the Bakken has 200 billion barrels.
Untapped Potential
Some bigger oil companies are hearing the message. “This entire region of the Rockies holds untapped potential that can contribute much needed supplies to help meet U.S. demand,” says Marathon spokesman Paul Weeditz, though he won't elaborate on the company's plans for its recent Bakken lease purchases.
In August, Enerplus Resources Fund, a large Canadian investor in oil and gas properties, bought Lyco and set plans for investing in new wells in the Bakken. Halliburton retains its stake in the venture.
Shell, which left Sidney in the 1990s, says it is not coming back. “In the 1990s, Shell exited many onshore properties in order to dedicate resources to the exploration and development of the deepwater Gulf of Mexico,” says a spokeswoman, Kelly op de Weegh. Since then, she says, Shell has resumed some onshore exploration, but is only looking for natural gas.
Mr. Findley and his wife, Lynn, still have long discussions over the kitchen table, but they're no longer about the survival of his tiny Billings company, Prospector Oil Inc. They're about remodeling their house, which they bought in 1978. That's about the only sign his neighbors will see that he has become a wealthy man. The rest goes into the bank, he says. “I'm going to build an estate for my family that will last for a long time to come.”
Write to John J. Fialka at [email protected] read more

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AFX Europe (Focus): Royal Dutch Shell Philippine unit says still studying options on refinery ops

Apr 05, 2006
MANILA (AFX) – Royal Dutch Shell PLC subsidiary Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp is still studying whether to shut down its refinery in the Philippines, a company spokesman said.
“Our studies are still ongoing and no decision has been reached. We will decide by the end of the year,” Pilipinas Shell spokesman Roberto Kanapi told XFN-Asia in a phone interview.
Local newspapers today reported, citing an unidentified industry source, that Pilipinas Shell is likely to keep its refinery here which has a capacity of 110,000 barrels a day, as refineries worldwide benefit from better margins amid steep oil prices.
Kanapi said there are still “a lot of considerations that have to be made” in deciding whether the company will keep its refinery but did not elaborate.
Pilipinas Shell has been considering options for its refining facility along with plans to list its shares here.
Under Manila's oil deregulation law, oil firms with refineries are required to sell at least 10 pct of their shares to the public. The law, passed in 1998, requires refiners to have gone public by early 2001.
But Shell has deferred its listing for years citing poor market conditions and while it reviews the viability of keeping its refinery.
Oil refiners have expressed concerns that the equal tariff rates for crude and refined oil products have reduced the profit margins of refineries, giving them no incentive to expand.
Refiner Petron Corp, the biggest of the three domestic oil firms which is co-owned by the Philippine government and Saudi Aramco, has been listed on the stock exchange even prior to the deregulation law. Caltex Philippines Inc, a unit of ChevronTexaco Corp, shut down its refinery in 2003.
[email protected]
cey/mas
null read more

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AFX UK (Focus): Sibir Energy crude output rises to over 22,000 bpd for wk starting March 27

Apr 05, 2006
LONDON (AFX) – Sibir Energy PLC said its total crude oil production for the week beginning March 27 averaged more than 22,000 barrels per day (bpd), a record high.
Over 15,000 bpd of production is now represented by Sibir's 50 pct share of output at the Salym group of fields, operated by Salym Petroleum Development NV – Sibir's joint venture with Shell in western Siberia – which is producing in excess of 30,000 bpd.
Commercial production at the Salym fields began last December and is expected to reach 60,000 bpd, with Sibir's share reaching 30,000 bpd, by the end of 2006.
“As Sibir approaches the tenth anniversary of its activities in Russia, we are very pleased that production at Salym is ramping up according to plan and that the reservoir is performing as expected,” said chief executive Henry Cameron.
The balance of Sibir's daily production for the week of over 7,000 bpd was provided by OAO Magma, a production subsidiary 95 pct owned by Sibir where production is expected to remain stable at current levels.
[email protected] read more

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