Russia boosted crude output 2.8 percent in January from a year earlier, the Energy Ministry said Tuesday, after Rosneft ramped up production at Vankor, the country’s largest new oil development.
Production grew to 10.04 million barrels a day, the Energy Ministry’s CDU-TEK unit said in an e-mailed statement. Oil output was down slightly from December, when the country produced 10.05 million barrels a day.
Producers exported 4.78 million barrels of oil a day to countries outside the former Soviet Union, a decline of 0.5 percent from a year earlier and 1.4 percent from December. Total exports were 5.22 million barrels a day, excluding supplies to Belarus, for which CDU-TEK said it didn’t have data.
Vankor’s output has risen to 220,000 barrels a day in January since its August start. Rosneft, the country’s largest oil producer, expects output at the field to reach 500,000 barrels a day by 2014, the equivalent of the world’s fifth-largest oil-producing field currently.
Rosneft produced a total of 2.43 million barrels a day, an increase of 6.2 percent from a year earlier, while a decline of 0.2 percent from December.
LUKoil, the country's second largest oil producer, pumped 1.84 million barrels of crude a day last month, little changed from a year ago and an increase of 1.3 percent from December.
LUKoil’s plans to boost oil output shifted abroad to Iraq where it and partner Statoil signed a contract for the West Qurna-2 field on Jan. 31. Investment in the project may reach $30 billion, LUKoil chief executive Vagit Alekperov told Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, according to the government web site. The field may produce 95 million tons of oil a year, about the level of LUKoil’s annual output.
TNK-BP boosted output at new projects in eastern Siberia and the Uvat region, balancing declines at older fields. The company pumped 1.42 million barrels a day, an increase of 3.8 percent from the previous year and little changed on the month.
The ExxonMobil-led Sakhalin-1 project produced 142,000 barrels a day, down 26 percent from a year earlier and 5.7 percent from December, before new deposits come on line. Exxon’s partners are Rosneft, ONGC Videsh, and Japan’s Sakhalin Oil & Gas Development.
Surgutneftegaz reduced output to 1.17 million barrels a day, a decline of 1.7 percent from December. That extended the Surgut-based company’s 3.3 percent decline for the full year of 2009, as its Talakan field in eastern Siberia failed to compensate for declines at the company’s west Siberia unit.
Bashneft, which billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s Sistema bought control of last year, raised output 14 percent from a year earlier to 270,000 barrels a day. That was a 4.7 increase from December.
Natural gas output increased 2.3 percent compared with December to 63.95 billion cubic meters. Gazprom produced 50.8 billion cubic meters of the fuel in January, the ministry’s unit said.