MOSCOW: Oil producer Rosneft plans to invest around 92 billion roubles ($2.8 billion) by 2015 to develop three fields in East Siberia, key to honouring its export deals with Asia, the company said on Thursday.
In a strategic shift in its energy policy, Russia launched the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline in 2009 to supply fast-growing Asian markets and in particular China, the world's top oil importer.
Rosneft, the world's biggest listed producer with a daily average of 4.2 million barrels of oil this year, plans to triple oil exports to China to some 1 million barrels per day (bpd) in the coming years.
Last month, it said it was delaying peak output at the East Siberian Vankor field, which will now produce 500,000 bpd by 2019 from an earlier expected 2013-2014, and only with the help of three other fields acquired via this year's $55 billion takeover of TNK-BP.
Its Suzun, Tagul and Lodochnoye fields "will allow it to load ESPO (with oil) for a long perspective", Rosneft said on Thursday.
Rosneft's spokeswoman said that the 92 billion roubles of investments are for three fields apart from Vankor.
Vankor alone pumped an average 435,000 bpd in October, according to Energy Ministry data. New fields will boost Rosneft annual oil production growth to 3-4 percent after 2017, the company told analysts this week.
It expects to add an average 1 percent of production between 2014 and 2017 by focusing on new technologies like horizontal wells with multi-stage fracturing, while maintaining flat output at its core brownfield sites.
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