Category: Kazakhstan

Hungarian energy company MOL said it discovered oil and natural gas while drilling into the Rozhkovskoye field onshore Kazakhstan. MOL said it posted a test flow rate of 1.9 million barrels of oil equivalent and 6 million cubic feet of natural gas per day from the field’s Federovsky block. MOL has a 27.5 percent stake in a consortium controlled by the country’s state-owned KazMunaiGas. The Hungarian company said qualitative analysis was underway to get a better understanding of the full reserve potential in the Federovsky block. The company offered no reserve estimate for the entire Rozhkovskoye field in its Monday announcement. Kazakhstan has the second largest oil reserves and is the second largest oil producer among former Soviet republics. Onshore fields like Rozhkovskoye account for roughly half of the country’s proven oil reserves, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports . © 2014 United Press […]

Click here to view full article at www.upi.com

Hungarian energy company MOL said it discovered oil and natural gas while drilling into the Rozhkovskoye field onshore Kazakhstan. MOL said it posted a test flow rate of 1.9 million barrels of oil equivalent and 6 million cubic feet of natural gas per day from the field’s Federovsky block. MOL has a 27.5 percent stake in a consortium controlled by the country’s state-owned KazMunaiGas. The Hungarian company said qualitative analysis was underway to get a better understanding of the full reserve potential in the Federovsky block. The company offered no reserve estimate for the entire Rozhkovskoye field in its Monday announcement. Kazakhstan has the second largest oil reserves and is the second largest oil producer among former Soviet republics. Onshore fields like Rozhkovskoye account for roughly half of the country’s proven oil reserves, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports . © 2014 United Press […]

Click here to view full article at www.upi.com

The $50bn Kashagan oil project in Kazakhstan is likely to be delayed by two more years while 200km of pipeline is replaced, in a further blow for the companies developing the largest oilfield outside the Middle East. Erbolat Dossayev, Kazakhstan’s minister for economy and budget planning, told the FT that he expected production to start at the end of next year at the earliest – but that it could be delayed until 2016. It is the first public admission by the government that the project will not only fail to produce oil this year but may not resume production until 2016. “It will be two years,” added one industry official. It is a blow for the consortium of companies – including ExxonMobil , Royal Dutch Shell , Total , and CNPC – which have invested some $50bn in the project so far in the hope that it would one […]

Click here to view full article at www.ft.com

It has been reported by overnight that the super-giant  Kashagan oilfield in the northern Caspian sea “will be out of production for at least two years”. The shutdown has been necessitated by leaks of toxic gas from a pipeline, with Quartz reporting that two new pipelines will now be required to replace the two existing oil and gas pipelines.” “As reported in the FT last month , the Kashagan field had already been beset by problems over many years, with production  only beginning on 11 September last year, nearly a decade behind schedule. So far it has only produced at a rate of about 75,000 barrels a day for only one month, as it was shut in again in October shortly after beginning to produce when the problem of toxic-gas leaks first became apparent. The FT’s report had already […]

Click here to view full article at www.jeremyleggett.net

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (386) , Asia’s biggest refiner known as Sinopec, agreed to pay about $1.2 billion to buy a 50 percent stake in energy assets in Kazakhstan from Russia’s OAO Lukoil. The deal is expected to be completed before the end of the year, Lukoil said in a statement. Lukoil’s Caspian Investment Resources Ltd. owns, through a number of joint ventures, various stakes in four hydrocarbon-production projects in Kazakhstan. Lukoil’s share in commercial hydrocarbon production as part of the projects was 10.2 million barrels of oil equivalent in 2013, it said. To contact the reporter on this story: Aibing Guo in Hong Kong at [email protected] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jason Rogers at [email protected] Madelene Pearson

Click here to view full article at www.bloomberg.com

It should have turned Kazakhstan into a global oil and geopolitical champion. Instead, it turned out to be a cul-de-sac, swallowing over $50 billion since its discovery almost two decades ago. Kashagan, a mammoth-sized offshore oil field with recoverable reserves of some 13 billion barrels that stretches over more than 3000 square kilometers, was recently shut down indefinitely due to technical problems. With Kazakh ambitions scuttled and the reputation of the project-managing consortium in tatters, will it go down in history as the Titanic of oil fields? From euphoria to despair, Kashagan has been through it all. Major cost overruns, intense squabbles between major stakeholders, and insurmountable technical problems  prevented  the project from seeing daylight in 2005, as contractually required. Instead, it only began pumping the first barrels in September last year, but this lasted just a few days before the appearance of […]

Click here to view full article at www.resilience.org

An aerial view shows the artificial islands at the Kashagan offshore oil field in the Caspian sea in western Kazakhstan in this October 16, 2013 file photograph. PARIS— SA said Friday it doesn’t expect the to yield much output this year but said it was on the cusp of approving a $4 billion . The resumption of the Kashagan project has been beset with problems even since a tricky-to-fix gas leak forced the French company and its partners to stop production in October. "If there were to be any production by the end of the year, it wouldn’t be much," Total’s president for exploration and production, Arnaud Breuillac, told reporters on the sidelines of an oil conference in Paris. He said the companies are waiting for the results of analyses and ultrasound probes on the leaking pipeline to identify the problem and find ways to fix it. Resuming output […]

Click here to view full article at online.wsj.com

An aerial view shows the artificial islands at the Kashagan offshore oil field in the Caspian sea in western Kazakhstan in this October 16, 2013 file photograph. PARIS— SA said Friday it doesn’t expect the to yield much output this year but said it was on the cusp of approving a $4 billion . The resumption of the Kashagan project has been beset with problems even since a tricky-to-fix gas leak forced the French company and its partners to stop production in October. "If there were to be any production by the end of the year, it wouldn’t be much," Total’s president for exploration and production, Arnaud Breuillac, told reporters on the sidelines of an oil conference in Paris. He said the companies are waiting for the results of analyses and ultrasound probes on the leaking pipeline to identify the problem and find ways to fix it. Resuming output […]

Click here to view full article at online.wsj.com

While oil supply from Kazakhstan has increased, its giant Kashagan oil field has "sucked in" major capital with little to show for it, OPEC said Thursday. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said in its monthly market report oil supply from Kazakhstan increased by 60,000 barrels per day year-on-year to average 1.64 million bpd. Kazakhstan hosts Kashagan, one of the largest oil fields in the world, with an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil reserves. Production was halted in October, less than a month after it started, when a pipeline associated with the field cracked open. OPEC said final results from pipeline inspections aren’t due until second quarter 2014, though the project has already consumed substantial investments. "The giant Kashagan project has sucked in almost $50 billion without yielding a barrel of oil," OPEC said in its market report. The North Caspian Operation Co. […]

Click here to view full article at www.upi.com

While oil supply from Kazakhstan has increased, its giant Kashagan oil field has "sucked in" major capital with little to show for it, OPEC said Thursday. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said in its monthly market report oil supply from Kazakhstan increased by 60,000 barrels per day year-on-year to average 1.64 million bpd. Kazakhstan hosts Kashagan, one of the largest oil fields in the world, with an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil reserves. Production was halted in October, less than a month after it started, when a pipeline associated with the field cracked open. OPEC said final results from pipeline inspections aren’t due until second quarter 2014, though the project has already consumed substantial investments. "The giant Kashagan project has sucked in almost $50 billion without yielding a barrel of oil," OPEC said in its market report. The North Caspian Operation Co. […]

Click here to view full article at www.upi.com