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Zarubezhneft celebrates 40th anniversary of the joint venture Vietsovpetro

23/06/2021

Zarubezhneft and the Vietnamese oil company PetroVietnam are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the joint venture Vietsovpetro. Established in 1981, it changed the perception of Vietnam's oil prospects and gave impetus to the development of the country's economy.

In general, over 40 years, Vietsovpetro specialists have drilled 644 wells and produced 240 million tons of oil. Today the operations of the enterprise is provided by more than 40 fixed platforms, 3 floating oil storage facilities, 5 offshore jack-up rigs and 20 vessels of its fleet, which constitute one of the best shore bases in Southeast Asia for the construction and installation of process platforms for drilling and oil production and gas.

The company employs 418 Russian specialists, which is 7% of the total number of employees. Together with their families, they live in a well-developed residential camp located inside the Vungtau City, with an area of 108 thousand square meters. This is a fenced and guarded area, where there are residential buildings, a school, a kindergarten, a shopping center, a sports complex, as well as its own diesel power plant and a water pumping station.

The main field is the White Tiger, which is at a mature stage of its life cycle. To maintain the current production at the level of 3 million tons of oil per year, Vietsovpetro is optimizing wells operation and developing systems for maintaining formation pressure. For example, over the past 5 years, the base production decline rate has been reduced by almost in half.

In the area of geological exploration, the company applies the latest approaches to conducting seismic surveys. This makes it possible to discover more and more complex deposits and efficiently replenish depleted reserves. In addition, Vietsovpetro's specialists increase the speed of putting new facilities into operation: from the discovery of reserves to the start of production, it takes only 2-3 years, taking into account the most difficult conditions of the marine shelf.

In recent years, Vietsovpetro has acquired participating interest in three new projects - blocks 09-3/12, 16-1/15 and 09-2/09, and also acts as an operator for Zarubezhneft for blocks 04-3 and 12/11. The joint venture accounts for about 30% of national oil production, which allows it to be the industry leader. Owing to Vietsovpetro, Vietnam is one of the four largest oil-producing countries in Southeast Asia, along with Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.

“Russia and Vietnam give high estimates of the economic efficiency of the Vietsovpetro project,”  comments Sergey Kudryashov, General Director of Zarubezhneft, “We plan to expand the area of activity and enter new effective projects on the shelf of Vietnam. We have already begun negotiations with the Vietnamese side to extend the Intergovernmental Agreement until 2045 at least”.

KeyFacts Energy: Zarubezhneft Vietnam country profile

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