Rosneft began production from the northern tip of the Chayvo field, located off northern Sakhalin Island.
Rosneft President Igor Sechin said that Chayvo will produce about 1.5 million tons of oil annually, with the northern tip of the field containing more than 15 million tons of oil and 13Bcm of gas. Production drilling began in May, with Sechin noting at that time that “Far East is the priority area for Rosneft.”
Drilling operations in the shallow water area are being carried out by Yastreb shore rig, which is currently drilling a second, 11km well. Rosneft said there will be five wells in total.
Chayvo is one of three fields that comprise the large-scale Sakhalin-1 project, located in the Russian Far East, and it originally began producing in October 2005. Project operator Exxon Neftegas Ltd. states that there is a phase two associated with Chayvo that concentrates on an expanded development of its natural gas resources.
The Odoptu field, another field in the Sakhalin-1 project, has been producing since 2010. Exxon Neftegas said that a flowline transports the field's oil and gas to the Chayvo onshore processing facility. From there, oil is sent to the De-Kastri Terminal for tanker shipment to the international market and gas is stabilized for either domestic supply or for reinjection into the field to maintain reservoir pressure.
The third field in Sakhalin-1, Arkutun-Dagi, was brought into production 27 June through the Berkut platform. Sechin announced that the platform (pictured) will start drilling the first well in the Sea of Okhotsk, but did not name a date.
He also noted that it would become a primary source for its Far East LNG plant. Rosneft and ExxonMobil are currently constructing a liquefaction plant on Sakhalin Island. The initial designed capacity is 5mtpa of LNG with the possibility for expansion, Interfax reported on 23 May.
Production from Chayvo began three days after a Bloomberg reported that Rosneft’s oil output has declined to its lowest level since it acquired Russian producer TNK-BP in March 2013 to become the world’s largest traded oil producer. Citing the Russian Energy Ministry’s CDU-TEK statistics unit, Bloomberg said that Rosneft's output fell 1% in August from a year earlier, and was down .2% from the previous month to 16.16 million metric tons.
The Sakhalin-1 consortium is: operator Exxon Neftegas (30%); Rosneft, through affiliates RN-Astra (8.5%) and Sakhalinmorneftegas-Shelf (11.5%); Japanese consortium SODECO (30%); Indian state-owned oil company ONGC Videsh (20%).
Rosneft says that more than 63 million tons of oil and almost 14 billion tons of gas have produced on the company’s Sakhalin shelf.
Image of the Berkut platform from Rosneft.
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