Rosneft gains Exxon expertise in developing tough oil reserves

Moscow/London Russian state oil firm Rosneft will gain access to North American energy sources and know-how for developing hard-to-produce reserves when it finalises a joint venture with Exxon Mobil Monday, industry sources said.

Rosneft was offered a role in seven ExxonMobil projects under its landmark deal last year with the biggest US oil company, which could open up 36 billion barrels of oil in the Arctic offshore and help keep Russia's place as the world's top producer.

Rosneft chose three to start. Two industry sources with knowledge of the deal said they were La Escalera Ranch, a tight-oil project in West Texas, a drilling venture in the Cardium shale in Canada's province of Alberta, and 20 fields in the US Gulf of Mexico out of the 144 operated by ExxonMobil.

Sources said they would gain minority interests in the projects, and may pursue more joint projects in future, including ventures in third countries.

Rosneft's focus in North America will be on so-called unconventional hydrocarbons — including resources such as shale oil and shale gas — which cannot be accessed with conventional vertical drilling. It will seek to deploy the advanced recovery methods at its own fields in Siberia.

Russia's oil tsar, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, will present the project to analysts with Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, and the head of Rosneft, Eduard Khudainatov, on Wednesday in New York, according to an invitation to the event.

Exxon posted an announcement regarding the briefing on its website later on Friday. The two-hour meeting will also include a Rosneft presentation on the Russian oil industry, the posting said.

The joint venture deal will be formalised tomorrow, the sources said. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said, however, that he was not aware of any planned meetings on the matter.

Finalising the joint venture will mark a major turnaround for Exxon, which scaled back its presence in Russia after failing to buy into the country's largest oil company Yukos, whose boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested in 2003.

Khodorkovsky was subsequently jailed for fraud and tax evasion, Yukos was bankrupted by back-tax claims and Rosneft snapped up its prime assets at auction to become Russia's largest oil producer.

Exxon has highlighted the potential of its projects in West Texas, where the fields of the Permian Basin — a mature oil-producing region like Western Siberia with tight oil that is harder to extract than conventional oil — have regained appeal at higher oil prices.

Under the terms of the deal, initialled in August 2011, the two will also look at joint development of tight oil in Western Siberia, where production of conventional oil is in decline.

Russian oil companies have little experience in tight oil but look to US technologies as an example of what is possible at home.

Russia's No 2 oil producer, Lukoil, has also said it is interested in pursuing unconventional oil in the US, though it has been put off by high asset prices.

Rosneft has said that it could have more than 2.5 billion tonnes of oil in the shales of the so-called Bazhenov formation at its West Siberian conventional fields, discovered and explored by Soviet-era geologists.

Analysts say the Siberian tight oil, held in non-porous rock, might be brought to production sooner than the three offshore blocks in the hostile and challenging environment of the Arctic Kara Sea that Rosneft and Exxon plan to explore.

Russia has not made a major oil discovery since the Soviet era, and developing offshore and unconventional fields will be vital to keeping its lead as the world's largest oil producer and sustaining output at above 10 million barrels per day.

The Exxon-Rosneft deal was contingent on a softened tax regime for Arctic offshore investment. That won political backing on Thursday from Putin, who returns to the Kremlin next month after winning a presidential election.

In contrast to the US, where oil companies face political pressure to pay more taxes, Russia is looking for ways to ease one of the world's toughest tax regimes that has been blamed for a shortfall in investment in the sector which provides the country with over half its budget revenue.