MOSCOW, December 16. /TASS/. Chances to find new reserves in the Arctic when drilling a well are about 20%, and the cost of work is about 10 times higher than even in developing complex deposits, Director of Gazprom Oil's Geological Exploration Yury Masalkin told reporters.

"The Arctic Zone has been very little studied. While there has been at least exploration in Eastern Siberia and many deposits have been discovered, for certain parts of the Arctic - historically no work has been carried out and it happens so that there may be not a single exploration well in the area of 500 kilometers in the tundra. The geological success chance in the Arctic is about 20%, while the cost of a well may be 10 times higher than when drilling even for complex Achimov deposits," he said.

The interest in the Arctic may be explained by the fact that geological exploration in traditional mining sites does not allow maintaining the required production level in the future, he continued. Therefore, the company has identified strategic areas: extraction of hard-to-recover resources, development in the Arctic and Eastern Siberia, offshore, involvement in development of residual recoverable reserves, and work on solutions to increase the oil recovery rate.

"The next strategic challenge is new search zones on land. These are the Arctic and Eastern Siberia. These are poorly studied regions, with infrastructures that are underdeveloped compared to Western Siberia," he said.

As for Eastern Siberia, it is known for the huge area and spread, high distribution of reserves in different parts. The resource base density in Eastern Siberia is 20 times lower than in Western Siberia, he added.

"That is, there are medium and big deposits, but distances between them are huge. This is an infrastructural, organizational and managerial challenge - to create an interaction structure to work successfully and cost-effectively with such distributed assets," he said in conclusion.