Sections will appear in the sea – Newspaper Kommersant No. 166 (7367) dated 09/09/2022

The Ministry of Natural Resources is going to change the rules for granting exploration licenses in coastal waters. Now companies can receive them on the so-called declarative principle, but now the ministry is thinking about disclosing the list of requested licenses, which significantly increases the chances of competing applications and, accordingly, an auction. Experts admit that the new procedure will increase the chances of unscrupulous players appearing, but they consider it right to open the process.

According to Kommersant, the Ministry of Natural Resources has prepared a draft government decree, according to which Rosnedra will publish a list of sites in the territorial sea and inland waters for which applications have been received from subsoil users. Now the company can get a site on applications that are submitted in two windows – from December to January and in June-July. The fact that the application has been filed becomes publicly known only at the moment when Rosnedra issues a license to it. Now, according to the project, the list of applications will be published on the Rosnedra website twice a year.

The Ministry of Natural Resources told Kommersant that they are preparing an adjustment to the current rules for granting subsoil plots located in offshore areas. “Thus, the issue of preliminary disclosure of information on received applications is being studied. If several companies show interest in such a plot at once, it will be offered for auction,” the ministry said.

Now Rosnedra is publishing a list of sites that the state offers for subsoil auctions. If the same approach applies to applications for geological surveys in marine areas, it increases the chances that more than one application will be submitted for one site. Then, according to the rules, an auction should be held. So far, there have been no such precedents. Applications for plots were received from LUKOIL, Gazprom Neft and Igor Yusufov’s structures, but in practice they faced serious red tape in coordination, and LUKOIL has not yet been able to obtain a single license.

The initiator of the change in the rule for granting plots in the territorial sea and inland waters is Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko, who instructed the Federal Agency for Subsoil Use and the Ministry of Natural Resources to “clarify procedures in order to increase the transparency of granting the right to use plots” (see Kommersant on August 8). Private companies were able to obtain licenses for such areas on a declarative basis only after the approval of the relevant rules at the end of 2020. Previously, offshore areas in the Arctic, considered offshore, were provided only to state-owned companies, and coastal areas, formally not related to the shelf, due to imperfect legislation, the government did not play between private players. The exception was NOVATEK, which was awarded licenses by the government in the Gulf of Ob for LNG projects.

Some interlocutors of Kommersant fear that the disclosure of applications will increase the chances of the appearance of unscrupulous players who can provoke an auction and increase the price of a license, although in reality they themselves are not interested in obtaining it. In addition, the publication of the application may draw the attention of state-owned companies to this site, which have significantly more financial resources, one of Kommersant’s sources said.

The participation of unscrupulous companies cannot be ruled out, but in general the decision of the Ministry of Natural Resources is correct, since the openness of the process will increase its attractiveness, Mikhail Grigoriev, head of the Gekon Consulting Center, believes, concluding that “there are other departments to assess the dishonesty of participants and relevant decisions.”

Dmitry Kozlov