Russia's oil major Lukoil has won a tender for the development of a rich oilfield in Iraq in partnership with Norway's Statoil. Lukoil's investment in the Western Qurna-2 extraction venture with the projected capacity of more than 95-million tons of crude per year will exceed $30 billion under a deal that ended 13 years of the company's bidding for a stake in Western Qurna-2, one of the largest oil deposits in Iraq. The first installment will be invested this year with full-scale extraction scheduled to begin in 2012. Lukoil's persistent efforts to win a contract to develop Western Qurna-2 have been rewarded despite strong resistance from the United States. Congratulating the company at a meeting with its CEO Vagit Alekperov on Monday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he hoped the contract would not only yield handsome dividends to Lukoil but would benefit the entire Russian oil industry.
A day earlier, Russia and Venezuela set up a consortium for the development of the Junin-6 oil field in the Orinoco River Basin with the Russian oil companies Lukoil, Rosneft, TNK-BP, Surgutneftegaz and Gazpromneft pledging to invest over $10 billion in the $20-billion dollar project. Head of Russia's Union of Oil and Gas Producers Gennady Shmal hailed the economic and political significance of the deal:
"We have accumulated many interesting technological solutions in recent years, which enabled our companies such as Lukoil, Ritek, Rosneft and others to participate in a whole number of oil ventures in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Oman, China and elsewhere. The economic effect of this participation bolsters our country's political prestige".
Igor Tomberg, a senior analyst at the Center for Energy Studies of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, echoes that such ventures are extremely profitable because oil in Russia is hard and costly to extract. Apart from receiving access to new markets with a huge investment and technological potential, Russia emerges as a major player in the global oil industry.
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