Surgutneftegaz Pays 200% Over Asking Price for West Siberia Oilfield

Surgutneftegaz offered 46.2 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) for the Severo-Rogozhnikovskoye oilfield (the Shpilman deposit) in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area in West Siberia compared with the selling price of 14 billion rubles.

The other bidders included state-run oil major Rosneft, Gazprom Neft’s subsidiary Gazpromneft-Khantos and Status, a Gazprombank subsidiary.

The Shpilman oilfield’s recoverable reserves are estimated at 32.947 million tons under C1 category, 57.432 million tons under C2 category and 7.196 million tons under C3 category.

The Shpilman deposit is one of the last three major oilfields discovered in the Soviet period, along with the Lodochnoye and Imilor fields. Last Tuesday, Russian-British joint venture TNK-BP won an auction to buy the Lodochnoye deposit in the Krasnoyarsk Territory in East Siberia, offering 4.6 billion rubles or 30 percent above the auction price.

The field has recoverable oil reserves of about 43 million metric tons (315 million barrels) and recoverable gas reserves of around 70 billion cubic meters.

The auction to sell the Imilor oilfield will be held next Tuesday.

After the auctions for the three deposits are over, no large unexploited oil fields will be left in Russia, Federal Subsoil Agency deputy head Igor Plesovskikh said in October.

"If we complete the auctions on Imilor, Severo-Rogozhnikovskoye (Shpilman) and Lodochnoye in 2012 we will thus draw the line under the era of the mineral reserve base on oil that was established in Soviet days,” he said.