MOSCOW, August 18. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian oil major Rosneft and Norway’s Statoil have launched exploratory drilling in the Norwegian sector of the Barents Sea, Rosneft said on Monday.

“The first exploration well Pingvin-1 will be drilled by the Transocean Spitsbergen rig. The water depth is 422 meters and the drilling target total vertical depth is 1,516 meters. The companies expect to analyze the drilling results until the end of 2014,” Rosneft said in a statement.

Rosneft joined a project to develop the Norwegian continental shelf in the Barents Sea in June 2013, following the results of a tender, in which it was granted a 20% stake in four fields.

A year earlier, Rosneft and Statoil signed an agreement on the joint extraction of hydrocarbons in promising areas in the Barents and Okhotsk Seas in 2016-2018.

Rosneft is also jointly extracting hydrocarbons with the Anglo-Dutch oil major Shell under the Sakhalin-II oil and gas project off Russia’s Pacific coast and with the US-based energy giant ExxonMobil for developing the continental shelf of the Kara and Black Seas.