NOC may get the most expensive oil field in 2023

The Nyaganneft company (a subsidiary of NNK Oil owned by Eduard Khudainatov) was the only company that applied to participate in the auction for the Lebyazhy block in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug with oil reserves of 37 million tons. This was reported to Vedomosti by a representative of the Ministry of Natural Resources.

According to the GIS “Torgy”, the Lebyazhye site is the most expensive among all subsoil plots with hydrocarbon raw materials put up for auction in 2023. The initial price of the auction for the right to use subsoil for the purpose of exploration and production in Lebyazhye is 580.6 million rubles. with a step of 10% (58.06 million rubles).

The acceptance of applications for participation in the auction ended on June 23, and the auction itself was to be held on July 20, 2023. Now the commission must assess how Nyaganneft’s application meets the requirements of the auction.

By law, if only one company has applied to participate in the auction, it can receive the site without bidding. In this case, the price of the license will be determined according to the formula “initial price plus one auction step”. That is, the cost of the license for Lebyazhy for Nyaganneft will be 638.7 million rubles.

According to Rosnedra, oil reserves in the Lebyazhye area in category B1 are 6.6 million tons, B2 – 30.4 million tons, resources in category D1 – 6.4 million tons, D2 – 0.4 million tons. In the south, the area borders with the Em-Yegovsky and Palyanovsky blocks of RN-Nyaganneftegaz (Nyaganneft belonged to this structure of Rosneft until April 2021), as well as with the north-eastern part of the Palyanovsky area of ​​the Krasnoleninskoye field of the Gazpromneft-Palyan company. To the west of the site of the Rosneft structure is the Talinsky subsoil plot, which belongs to Nyaganneft itself.

The Lebyazhy site was already put up for auction in 2022 for 765.7 million rubles, but the auction was declared invalid, since not a single application met the requirements. “Nyaganneft” was then one of the contenders for this area, along with LLC “Lukoil – Western Siberia” and OOO “UDS Neft”.

NOC has been planning to obtain the Lebyazhy site for a long time, because it is well explored and has a high potential for discovering new reserves (130 million tons), Dmitry Kasatkin, partner of Kasatkin Consulting, explains. “So 580 million rubles. “This is a very low price for such a plot,” he notes. The Lebyazhy site is part of the Krasnoleninsk group of fields with reserves of more than 1.2 billion tons of oil, the expert recalls.

According to Kasatkin, NOC was the main contender for Lebyazhy, as the company has assets in the surrounding areas. The NOC has an oil pipeline that will allow to start production in this area as soon as possible, and the cost of this could amount to 300-500 million rubles, because exploration wells have already been drilled, he adds.

Sergey Grishunin, managing director of the NRA rating service, explains that large subsoil users are not so much interested in obtaining small areas and are concentrating on the development of current assets in light of the reduction in oil production in Russia under OPEC+. For smaller companies, such subsoil plots are interesting because they can increase their capitalization by increasing reserves, he explains. “Also, the site may have exploration prospects that the company will be able to realize,” Grishunin added.

Russia announced in February 2023 that it would voluntarily cut oil production by 500,000 barrels per day starting in March. The decision has been extended several times, and is now valid until the end of 2024. Eight more OPEC+ countries have joined the voluntary production cuts. The total decline in production until the end of 2023 will be 1.66 million barrels per day.