Nearly all of Russia’s oil production will consist of the so-called hard-to-recover crude reserves unless the country speeds up and incentivizes exploration, Russia’s Deputy Energy Minister Pavel Sorokin said on Wednesday. “Almost 100% of our production will be hard to recover over the term of ten years,” Sorokin said, as quoted by Russian news agency TASS . The hard-to-recover reserves will have much higher lifting costs than conventional reserves, according to the deputy energy minister. This is a problem for Russia, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, as it would see the quality of its reserves decline and make the extraction of oil much more expensive than it is now. Russia needs to incentivize exploration in order to replace the hard-to-recover reserves with new, potentially lower-cost, discoveries. In May this year, Russia’s Natural Resources Minister Alexander Kozlov said that oil reserves would last until 2080 at the current […]