Q&A with Valery Isaakovich Graifer, Chairman of the Board of Directors, JSC Lukoil

Abstract

As Chairperson of the Executive Committee of the first SPE Russian Oil and Gas Technical Conference and Exhibition, could you outline the basic aims of the event? The 2006 SPE Russian Oil and Gas Technical Conference and Exhibition will be a major international event for the upstream oil and gas E&P community. It is being organized by SPE and Spearhead Exhibitions Ltd., the partnership responsible for the Offshore Europe conference in Aberdeen. The conference theme is "Technology for World-Class Resources." The theme speaks for itself and reflects the wide historical industry perspective, rich intellectual resources, and unique natural resources of Russia. The exhibition held jointly with the conference will be dedicated to innovative and existing technologies as well as to their optimal application to further develop the oil and gas industry of Russia at the world level. The conference addresses the need for an event that focuses on technology and knowledge exchange and will promote communication among oil and gas industry professionals who will find and produce future energy resources. This event will provide a unique opportunity for all its participants—managers, technical specialists, scientists, and students—to share their experiences and achievements in E&P. The conference will illustrate the technology needed to extend the resource base. Much more oil and gas will be produced from western Siberia and the Volga-Urals basins, and the development of new oil and gas basins in the Arctic offshore, eastern Siberia, and east Asia will replenish the mineral resources of Russia. High-quality mineral resources are quite scarce in all the branches of the mining industry; there are many more resources that have relatively lower quality or that are difficult to produce and for which more efficient technologies should be developed. It is the so-called "resources pyramid concept." Both in Russia and worldwide, the more resources that are produced, the worse their structure gets. In the past, in western Siberia and in the Volga River basin, we used to actively develop Cretaceous and Devonian deposits and had not been actively involved in development of resources of under-gas-cap zones, thin oil-pay fringes, and low-permeability reservoirs. Today, we have to develop the resources of low-permeability reservoirs of the Jurassic and Achim deposits of western Siberia as well as viscous-oil carbonaceous deposits and the resources of Permian deposits of Tatarstan natural bitumen. For Tatarstan and Bashkiria, it is very important to develop bitumen resources, but it is not possible to do it using the open-cut mining method as it is being done in Canada because the strata are deposited deeper and much plowland would be sacrificed. These difficult practical tasks will be solved by today's generation of engineers and scientists. Consequently, the aim of our conference is to solve practical tasks; it is not just academic sessions. It is very important to integrate the technological advances of the E&P industry all over the world with the unique resources of Russia to secure the energy future of our planet under the conditions of growing hydrocarbon costs.