Irina Slav, a writer for Oil Price has an intriguing piece revealing a new company that has been awarded an oil and gas exploration in the Black Sea shelf. The news about this new company, Novye Proekty, was published by Kommersant. The Crimean sea shelf is named the Glubokaya block. It holds, per Irina Slav, reserves estimated in 2011 at 8.3 million tons of crude and 1.4 billion cu m of natural gas. She notes that the Crimean shelf with it’s treasure trove of fossil fuels is one of the reasons for the “annexation” of Crimea by Vladimir Putin.
Slav writes:
What’s more interesting, however, is that Novye Proekty is a private company, and private companies are not allowed to explore for oil and gas in the Crimean shelf, TASS notes. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev opened the door for license-issuing for Crimea last year, but only state-owned companies were to be allowed through it. Yet, here this company is, awarded a 30-year license with the obligation to drill a well within the next eight years.
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In fact, Novye Proekty already had a license for the development of Glubokaya, it turns out. The license was issued in 2012 by the Ukrainian authorities. Could it be that the company proved a suitable figurehead for the launch of Russian exploration for oil and gas in the Crimean shelf?
It’s possible. EU and U.S. sanctions against Russia have targeted entities and individuals from the energy industry, restricting their freedom of movement, access to funding, and generally making their life difficult. Yet, nobody seems to have heard about Novye Proekty. The company has no assets to its name and no activity. Its owner, with 99 percent, is Glavneftservis, a company run by entrepreneur Anton Dornostup, who is close not just to Kurchenko but also to the former head of Russia’s federal subsoil resources management agency Rosnedra.
By the look of it, Novye Proekty is a classic shell company and maybe the time to get it into action has come. It would make sense for Moscow to be wary of putting Rosneft or Gazprom on the line in Crimea, especially when it became clear that the thawing in U.S.-Russian relations will not happen overnight and it won’t involve an acceptance by the Trump administration of the Crimea annexation. A shell company would be the more appropriate vehicle for tapping the Black Sea oil and gas resources of the peninsula.
I am just a blogger doing my best to draw attention to the perils of climate change. I am not a sleuth or journalist, but given that the above story identifies a previously unknown oil company being granted exploration rights in Crimea seems like an evasion of the sanctions placed on Russia for interfering in the 2016 election. And as the article points out, Russia will not wait until Trump’s multitude of scandals go away (they never will unless he starts a war) before Trump can accept the annexation of Crimea.
Nat Perry writing for Consortium News reported in 2014 that the Ukrainian conflict and Crimean annexation was all about the world’s oligarchs competition for that country’s oil and shale gas. This news was reported prior to President Obama’s sanctions on Russia due to Putin’s attack on the United States that helped swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
On Nov. 27, the Ukrainian government signed another production-sharing agreement with a consortium of investors led by Italian energy company Eni to develop unconventional hydrocarbons in the Black Sea. “We have attracted investors which will within five to seven years maximum double Ukraine’s domestic gas production,” Yanukovych said following the agreement.
At the time of Yanukovych’s ouster in February, Chevron and the Ukrainian government had been negotiating an operating agreement for the shale development effort in western Ukraine, and Chevron spokesman Cameron Van Ast said that the negotiations would go forward despite Yanukovych fleeing the country. “We are continuing to finalize our joint operating agreement and the government continues to be supportive,” Van Ast said.
Royal Dutch Shell is also engaged in the country, having signed an agreement last year with the government of Yanukovych to explore a shale formation in eastern Ukraine. When it comes to Crimea, numerous oil companies including Chevron, Shell, ExxonMobil, Repsol and even Petrochina have shown interest in developing its offshore energy assets.
Believing that Crimea’s onshore and offshore fields will live up to expectations, these companies have greatly expanded their exploration of the Black Sea off the Crimean peninsula. Some analysts believe that one of Vladimir Putin’s motivations for annexing Crimea was to ensure that Gazprom will control Crimean offshore energy assets in addition to ensuring the continued use of Crimea as host to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.