Abstract
ABSTRACTDuring an intense period of only 14 months, from June 2010 to August 2011, six major cooperation agreements between oil companies were announced in Russia. Almost all of these partnerships involved offshore projects, with an international oil company as one of the partners and Rosneft as the other. The agreements were concentrated along Russia's Arctic petroleum frontier, and the three that survived the longest involved oil or gas extraction in the Arctic. This article analyses and compares the contents and contexts of the agreements, to ascertain what they have to tell about access for international companies to Russia's offshore petroleum resources and the influence of competing Russian political actors over the country's petroleum sector. The article argues that the new partnerships did represent an intention to open up the Russian continental shelf, and that the agreements were driven and shaped by a series of needs: to secure foreign capital and competence, to reduce exploration risk, to lobby for a better tax framework, to show the government that necessary action was being taken to launch exploration activities, to improve Rosneft's image abroad, and either to avert or prepare for future privatisation of state companies such as Rosneft.
Highlights
In 2009, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia, temporarily becoming the world’s largest oil producer, while remaining one of the countries with the largest unsurveyed areas in the world
This article analyses and compares the contents and contexts of the agreements, to ascertain what they have to tell about access for international companies to Russia’s offshore petroleum resources and the influence of competing Russian political actors over the country’s petroleum sector
One reason behind the crackdown on Russia’s formerly largest oil company Yukos and its main shareholder M. Khodorkovskiy, apart from his intention of using his fortune to gain influence in Russian politics, was thought to be his plan to sell a major stake in the company to ExxonMobil, and to build an Arctic oil pipeline from Ukhta to Murmansk that would challenge Transneft’s near monopoly on Russian oil exports
Summary
In 2009, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia, temporarily becoming the world’s largest oil producer, while remaining one of the countries with the largest unsurveyed areas in the world. Projects on the Black Sea shelf were to pay a reduced natural resource extraction tax (Interfax 2010c: 17 June–23 June) This agreement was the first sign of a new thaw in Russia’s relations with major oil companies. It implied that Rosneft had admitted it could not develop its offshore reserves without western expertise, technology and capital (Chazan and GronholtPedersen 2011), and that the government was ready to give tax concessions for such projects. This was the most spectacular of the six partnerships: it included a USD 7.8 billion share-swap
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