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Our Arctic Neighbors: Russia resource-rich, Barents to Bering A significant proportion of the Arctic’s reserves of oil and gas is located in a few Russian provinces, the USGS estimates Sarah Hurst For Petroleum News
Three areas in the Russian Arctic contain the vast majority of that country’s undiscovered oil and gas resources, according to the recent U.S. Geological Survey appraisal of the Circum-Arctic. The Amerasia basin and the East Barents basin contain most of the oil, and the West Siberian basin and the East Barents basin contain most of the natural gas.
The Amerasia basin contains an estimated 9.724 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, and the East Barents basin contains an estimated 7.406 billion barrels (compared with 29.961 billion barrels in Arctic Alaska), the USGS estimates. The West Siberian basin contains an estimated 651.498 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered natural gas, and the East Barents basin contains 317.558 tcf of natural gas (compared with 221.398 tcf in Arctic Alaska). In other words, Russia is home to the largest resources of natural gas in the Arctic by a considerable margin.
Also Timan Pechora estimates A new assessment by USGS also details the more modest undiscovered oil and gas resources in Russia’s Timan Pechora basin. Geologically, this basin is a triangular-shaped cratonic block bounded by the Ural Mountains and the Timan Ridge, according to the USGS. Since 1930 when oil and gas exploration began in the area, more than 230 fields have been discovered and more than 5,400 wells have been drilled. This has resulted in the discovery of more than 16 billion barrels of oil and 40 tcf of gas.
Approximately half of the Timan Pechora basin is north of the Arctic Circle and this was the area that the USGS assessed. Within that northernmost portion of the basin, about one-third of the area is offshore, in the southeastern Barents Sea. The USGS defined three assessment units in the basin as a whole, one of which, the Northwest Izhma Depression in the northwest corner of the basin, lacks significant reservoir rocks and was not assessed. The other two assessment units are the Main basin platform in the center of the basin and the Foredeep basins on its eastern edge.
The estimated resources in the portions of the Main basin platform and Foredeep basins north of the Arctic Circle are 1,668 million barrels of oil, 9.062 tcf of natural gas and 204 million barrels of natural gas liquids. Nearly all of the undiscovered conventional oil resources are estimated to be in the Main basin platform, and 60 percent of the non-associated gas is estimated to be in the Foredeep basins.
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