MOSCOW, April 25 (Itar-Tass) —— Russia’s oil giant LUKOIL has started drilling works at the Iraqi West Qurna-2 oil field, the company said in its statement on Wednesday. In addition, the company began an oil treatment unit construction at the field. Iraqi Minister of Oil Abd al-Karim Luaybi attended the start-up ceremony on Wednesday.
The commercial drilling project envisages construction of 23 development wells. The operations will be held at five multiple-well platforms with the use of the most advanced diesel-and-electric units with a 450-tonne load-bearing capacity. The use of the units of the kind makes it possible to drill wells to the depth of up to 5,000 metres without the need of equipment remounting, the company explained.
The units were upgraded specifically for their use at a multiple-well pad under the cluster slider rig scheme. In the future, the total number of multiple-well pads will be raises by four, LUKOIL reported.
An oil treatment unit will be built jointly with multiple-well platforms’ structures and oil collection lines, as well as with water and energy supply networks, rotating workers’ camps and other infrastructure facilities and services, the company said.
“Earlier in the day, we commissioned the active stage of the field development, reaching the level of 150,000 barrels of oil a day,” LUKOIL CEO Vagit Alekperov said. “The company will receive the right to return its spending for the project, and will get benefits. The project will become self-financing one, when it returns preliminary investments in it.”
“Overall investments in the full-scale implementation of the project will be at about 25 billion U.S. dollars,” Alekperov said.
LUKOIL is the operator of the project. Proceeding from earlier reports, in the near future LUKOIL plans to raise its share in the West Qurna-2 project through the purchase of the share belonging to Norway’s Statoil company.
Iraq holds a 25-percent stake in the West Qurna-2 project. The field’s reserves are estimated at 12.9 billion barrels of oil.
LUKOIL is one of the world’s leading vertically integrated oil and gas companies. Main activities of the company are exploration and production of oil and gas, production of petroleum products and petrochemicals, and marketing of these outputs. Most of the company’s exploration and production activity is located in Russia, and its main resource base is in Western Siberia. LUKOIL owns modern refineries, gas processing and petrochemical plants located in Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, near-abroad countries. The company’s products are marketed in Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, in near-abroad countries and the USA.