Category: Russia

MOSCOW — Russia’s vast celebrations Saturday to mark the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany had nearly everything: 16,000 goose-stepping soldiers, medal-bedecked veterans and families carrying photographs of those who died long ago. But one group was conspicuously absent from the memorial of the Soviet Union’s joint victory with West: the leaders of those wartime allied nations. A year into a conflict in Ukraine that the West says is fueled by the Kremlin, the tribunes in Red Square on Saturday were stocked with officials from nations that had little to do with the Soviet Union’s painful wartime sacrifices. Even some Kremlin critics said they were disappointed by the snub. A decade ago, President George W. Bush sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin on stands in front of Lenin’s Tomb to observe the 60th anniversary. A decade before that, President Bill Clinton also came to Moscow in […]

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What is Reserve Growth? BP :  In general, a portion of a field’s probable and possible reserves tend to get converted into proved reserves over time as operating history reduces the uncertainty around remaining recoverable reserves: an aspect of the phenomenon referred to as ‘reserves growth’. Wiki : Experience shows that initial estimates of the size of newly discovered oil fields are usually too low. As years pass, successive estimates of the ultimate recovery of fields tend to increase. The term reserve growth refers to the typical increases in estimated ultimate recovery that occur as oil fields are developed and produced. Basically the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission have stringent reserve booking requirements for oil companies. As a result early booked reserves of any given field is very conservative. Also, any company would much rather have reserves too low and increase them later than have them too high and have to […]

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Gasoline is pumped into railway gasoline tankers at an oil refinery operated by OAO Bashneft in Ufa, Russia. Gas condensate is more valuable than other types of crude because when it’s refined it produces a very high proportion of high-value gasoline. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg With Siberia’s aging oil fields slowly running dry, Russia is turning to a natural gas by-product to help maintain crude production and meet President Vladimir Putin’s target of 10 million barrels a day. As companies including OAO Gazprom, OAO Novatek and OAO Rosneft get new Siberian gas fields up and running, they’re also boosting output of condensate, a prized, ultra-light form of crude that’s a common component of underground gas reserves. Condensate is especially important now because it’s not covered by sanctions on Russia’s oil industry that have targeted Arctic drilling and shale projects. Production of the ultra-light crude will swell as much as 17 […]

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Weekly pageviews of "Resource Crisis." My blog seems to be having a remarkable success in Russia, but do the Russians understand the problem of resource depletion? Complex structures, such as states and empires, are always prone to collapse and they usually give little or no previous warnings. The collapse of the Soviet Union, indeed, had not been predicted by anyone and it came completely unexpected. In the present crisis, instead, Western analysts seem to have fallen in the opposite mistake, predicting the rapid demise of the Russian Federation. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, the Russian economic system showed a remarkable resilience and it strongly rebounded after a bad moment, last year. (image below from Bloomberg). So, predicting collapses is always very difficult in a world’s situation that looks more and more like a Russian Roulette (an appropriate name in this context), but played with nuclear weapons. It […]

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Weekly pageviews of “Resource Crisis.” My blog seems to be having a remarkable success in Russia, but do the Russians understand the problem of resource depletion? Complex structures, such as states and empires, are always prone to collapse and they usually give little or no previous warnings. The collapse of the Soviet Union, indeed, had not been predicted by anyone and it came completely unexpected. In the present crisis, instead, Western analysts seem to have fallen in the opposite mistake, predicting the rapid demise of the Russian Federation. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, the Russian economic system showed a remarkable resilience and it strongly rebounded after a bad moment, last year. (image below from Bloomberg). So, predicting collapses is always very difficult in a world’s situation that looks more and more like a Russian Roulette (an appropriate name in this context), but played with nuclear weapons. It […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Tags: Gazprom | natural gas | | Ukraine | vladimir putin Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting in Abakan, the Republic of Khakassia, April 21, 2015. REUTERS/Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Kremlin For all of President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric about Russian nationalism and economic self-reliance, he finds himself surprisingly constrained in his ability to respond to the European Commission’s action against Gazprom. The European Commission’s decision to bring antitrust charges against the Russian energy giant sparked an immediate complaint from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He loudly protested that the European Union was changing the rules in midstream. The European Union, however, was trying to send a different message to Russia: institutions matter, and Gazprom does not get a free pass around its rules. The commission charged Gazprom with abusing its dominant market position and overcharging customers in several countries. As a state-owned firm with geo-strategic implications, Gazprom is no ordinary […]

Click here to view full article at blogs.reuters.com