A subsidiary of Russian oil company Gazprom Neft said Thursday it embarked on a new stage of assessing the shale oil potential in Western Siberia. Subsidiary Gazpromneft-Khantos started drilling into a shale oil well in the Krasnoleninsky field in the Bazhenov complex of Western Siberia. The company said it employed hydraulic fracturing at the site in order to improve oil extraction. “The Bazhenov formation is an example of our work with non-traditional deposits, which is an area the company is focused on developing,” Gazprom Neft Chief Executive Officer Vadim Yakovlev said in a statement. The company offered no estimate of the shale oil potential other than to say “commercial oil flows” have been achieved already at some of the wells in the region. In December, Russian energy company Rosneft, […]