Russian Shale: Bazhenov -- December 30, 2017

Back on December 8, 2012, this from the blog:

I've often said that the Bakken is now the "gold standard" for oil companies. This lede caught me by surprise:

Can Roseneft and Exxon Mobil help make Siberia more like ... North Dakota?

I kid you not. Page B16, WSJ, "Heard on the Street."  The article goes on:

When the Kremlin's oil champion and Big Oil's biggest sealed a strategic alliance in 2011, tight oil was little more than a footnote to ambitions in the Russian Arctic. But Friday's announcement of a deal to explore the enormous Bazhenov deposit makes Western Siberia suddenly much more important.

Like the Bakken shale under North Dakota, the Bazhenov is thought to contain vast oil reserves trapped in tight rock formations. At 570 million acres, its land mass is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined, according to Sanford. C. Bernstein. Bazhenov could hold between 60 billion and 140 billion barrels of oil, and production could approach one million barrels a day, or around 10% of Russia's total, by 2020, analysts say. Commercial production in the Arctic will only just be getting started by then. [For newbies: the Bakken, much, much smaller, could hold 500 billion bbls of oil; without political interference the Bakken will easily hit one million bbls of oil per day; and that is about 12% of current US domestic production. Just putting things into perspective.]

Now, a front page story in The Wall Street Journal today:

This western Siberian oil field is called “Red Lenin,” but its reserves have a distinctly American ring: shale.

The future of the Russian oil industry could lie in the vast Bazhenov shale formation, the largest in the world. Russia has become the biggest global producer of crude oil with almost no contribution from shale, a sometimes technically difficult and expensive resource to pump.

Only Americans have really gotten shale right so far, but the Kremlin is taking the first steps to unlock Russia’s potential.

Companies like PAO Gazprom Neft GZPFY -1.08% are leading Moscow’s drive to replicate the U.S. shale boom, experimenting with a uniquely Russian state-controlled approach to fracking that contrasts with the free-for-all among independent producers in Texas and North Dakota.

“The Bazhenov is a huge prize,” says Alexei Vashkevich, Gazprom Neft’s exploration director.

And, yes, this field/formation has been linked at the sidebar at the right since 2012.