Assets: Russian Natural Gas Firm Buying, Oil Majors Selling

Russian gas giant Gazprom is looking to purchase assets from BG Group that Shell bought earlier this year, the Business Insider said.

The firm’s Deputy Chief Executive, Alexander Medvedev, commented in an interview that the planned asset swap deal between the two giants could include BG’s properties, though he declined to specify the sites in-question.

The country’s oil companies have exhibited the opposite trend over the past few months; chronically-low oil prices have caused the firms to sell off assets to make up for lost revenues.

Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft will be selling off 23.8 percent of the Vankor oil field to its Indian counterparts, Oil India, Bharat PetroResources, and Indian Oil, according to a report by Forbes.

The Russian firm had been in discussions for this deal, as well as several others, for nearly a year before making the announcement last week.

Up to 50 percent of the crude produced by the field would be directed out of the east Siberian field to Indian-owned sites, the Russian business source Vedamosti said.

A total of 520 million metric tons of recoverable oil lay in the fields, according to geological estimates. The three Indian firms paid $2.1 billion to access the energy resources hidden in the area.

The government-owned Indian firm ONGC bought a 15 percent share of Vankorneft—a subsidiary that runs Vankor—last month for the price of a little over $1.5 billion. Rosneft has reportedly been interested in selling an even larger number of shares to Chinese firms.

Almost a fifth of the Russian company’s assets could be in the hands of China or India by the time the dump is over.

The Indian Oil Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, said he would not oppose becoming a co-stakeholder with China as his country does not “rival China in the energy sector.” Forbes previously reported that both countries’ state-owned oil firms have already worked together on several joint initiatives.

By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com

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