ASTRAKHAN: Rosneft, the world's top listed oil producer, and U.S. major ExxonMobil may start exploring Russia's Arctic ahead of schedule, despite Western sanctions over Ukraine, said Igor Sechin, head of the Russian company.
An early start to the project would send a clear signal to the energy industry that Russia is still open for business from the West despite sanctions, which threaten to push an already weakened economy into recession.
Sechin, a long-standing ally of President Vladimir Putin, also told Reuters he saw "nothing dramatic" in the reported decision of Lloyds Bank to withdraw from the financing of British major BP's deal to buy oil from Rosneft.
The drilling in the Arctic Kara Sea had been scheduled to begin in mid-August, but Sechin said it could be moved forward depending on the weather.
"The Kara Sea project is a high priority and we have been meticulously preparing for the project's implementation," Sechin told Reuters on the sidelines of a government meeting on Russia's energy sector in the Caspian Sea city of Astrakhan.
"It is likely that we will start drilling ahead of schedule. We had targeted mid-August, but now early August is more likely. We will monitor the weather."
Recoverable hydrocarbon reserves are estimated at 85 billion barrels of oil equivalent at the three Arctic fields Rosneft plans to develop jointly with Exxon, which has said it is committed to Russia despite Western sanctions.
Rosneft has signed similar deals on Arctic exploration with other international majors, including Norway's Statoil and Italy's Eni. Oil is likely to start flowing from these projects over the next decade, and the Arctic, as well as hard-to-recover crude, is seen as the next important source of Russian oil and gas production.
LLOYDS
Sechin has publicly admitted that sanctions over Russia's action in Ukraine have already started to bite, and Rosneft has had some difficulties with access to financial markets.
Some bankers told Reuters that Lloyds Bank, part-owned by the British government, has withdrawn from a $1.5-$2 billion trade finance deal involving Rosneft and BP, which owns almost one fifth of the Kremlin-controlled company.
The deal stalled after Washington imposed sanctions against Sechin at the end of April. Last year, BP agreed to buy crude oil and oil products from Rosneft with a total value of $15 billion.
Asked how he felt about Lloyds pulling out of the Rosneft-BP deal, Sechin did not confirm or deny the Reuters report but said: "It is about the possibility of a loan for BP. We will see. But it's nothing dramatic. It is about BP's work with their financial institutions."
He also said Rosneft was continuing talks with China's Sinopec about supplying up to 10 million tonnes (200,000 barrels per day) of oil a year, as Russia has been diversifying its energy exports away from Europe.
Rosneft plans to triple its oil supplies to China by 2020 to 46 million tonnes a year (920,000 barrels per day) from the 2012 level, and has signed a memorandum on crude oil delivery with Sinopec.
"We have prolonged the period of the memorandum on the possibility of increasing supplies of up to 10 million tonnes to Sinopec. We are working within the framework of the document," Sechin said.
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