During the 7th St. Petersburg International Gas Forum, the round-table discussion Russia is the bifurcation point of the oil and gas complex and the resource base in the 21 century took place. State and prospects of the Russian oil and gas resources in the current context, as well as the trends and potential of the geological exploration works turned out to be the most hot issues under discussion.

Oleg Prishchepa, CEO of the All-Russia Petroleum Research Exploration Institute (VNIGRI), talked about exploration and development of non-conventional oil and gas resources. “Reduction of the active oil reserves in traditional oil regions makes us consider using geological exploration in little-studied areas with complex geology – ashore, in the Arctic shelf, as well as search the mining resources among difficult-to-develop fields, as well as hydrocarbon crude in low-porous and poorly pervious strata,” said Mr. Prishchepa. The proven reserves of hydrocarbons of Russia are rather extensive, but economic prospects regarding mining of most of them in the context of low prices are quite ambiguous. Extractable oil resources fixed in the National Register as of January 1, 2016, are 29 bln tons, and condensate is 3.5 bln tons of this amount. However, according to the estimates of the Association of Oil Engineers and considering the economic factor, only 11 bln tons of the RF oil are believed to be economically rational. Actual reserves of Russia are 80 bln barrels, whereas such world leaders as Venezuela and Canada have 298.4 bln and 172.5 bln barrels, correspondingly. And a significant share of their reserves is classified as difficult to develop. In 2014, the USA joined Top-10 of the countries having the largest oil reserves after having made a breakthrough in mining oil from shale and dense rock.

There is a widely held belief that offshore zones have the highest potential when it comes to resources. Unfortunately, such zones have only 13% of oil potential accumulated, while its share ashore comes to 87%.

The CEO of VNIGRI announced 5 trends in fulfilling the tasks associated with building up or substituting the hydrocarbon resources in Russia mid- to long-term perspective:

• studying the districts, preparing the new hydrocarbon resource base in the remote and hard-to-get ashore areas;
• studying and preparing the new hydrocarbon resource bases in the shelf of the Arctic and Far East seas;
• involving unclaimed oil and gas resources in well-studied and industrialized areas into the industrial turnover;
• studying and involving difficult-to-develop reserves in unconventional low-porous and low-permeable collectors;
• intense development of alternative energetics with reduction of hydrocarbon resources use.

Victor Darishchev, Deputy CEO for Science and Innovation at RITEK JSC, spoke about innovative approaches to hydrocarbon fields development.
“RITEK is a polygon for testing innovative technologies. One of our company’s objectives is developing the reserves within the Bazhenov formation by means of thermal gas treatment. Now, we have two sites working with this technology, and intend to use it at two more sites,” Mr. Darishchev explained.

Besides the thermal gas treatment technologies, the company also applies the water alternated gas injections, which are intended to make homogenous fine mixture of water and associated oil gas for its further injection into the formation.

The speaker announced the following advantages of this fine water gas mixture:

1. higher coefficient of the collector coverage at oil displacement;
2. use of low-pressure associated oil gas (APG) without preliminary treatment;
3. reduction of the gas breakthrough risk due to high viscosity of fine water-gas mixture;
4. no flaking of water-gas mixture during its transportation along the well shaft.

The bottom-hole treatment method is applied at thermal-gas-chemical treatment with binary systems. The designed volume of the binary composition of non-organic salts (sodium nitrate and ammonia nitrate) is pumped into the perforated interval of the production well and is followed by pumping in the activating agent to start the process of thermo-baric degeneration of the binary composition.

During laboratory testing of the CO2 cycling into the production wells, the following was discovered:

1. CO2 is completely mixed with oil in case the carbonic dioxide concentration is up to 10%;
2. after adding CO2, oil viscosity is reduced 11.7-fold;
3. light phase volume is increased up to 10 times (oil development effect).

Tamara Valuyskova, Head of the Oil and Gas Section at the Department of the State Policy and Regulations within Geology and Subsoil Use, commented on the regulatory support for stimulation of mining of difficult-to-recover hydrocarbons. In her report, she presented a new project of the Federal Law “About introduction to the RF Law “About Subsoils” as regards to the procedure for granting the right for using subsoils with the view to establish and operate the polygons for development of geological exploration technologies, for exploration and (or) mining of hydrocarbon crude associated with Bazhenov, Abalak, Khadum, and Domanik productive deposits, as well as the deposits containing highly viscous oil with viscosity over 1,000 mPa*sec.” The draft federal law provides for changing certain articles, in particular, the ones on the subsoil use, the terms for the use of subsoil areas, the grounds for accrual of the right for the subsoil area use, the content of the subsoil use license. Tax liabilities of the subsoil users depend on the location of the deposits, where the index of oil recovery difficulty (kd) varies from 0.2 to 0.8. As of 2016, the amount of tax relief for subsoil users made 58, 625.3 mln rubles.