Russia's Gazprom Neft said on Friday that its total cumulative production from its Novoportovskoye field within the Arctic Circle has reached 5 million tons, or roughly 35 million barrels, since commercial drilling began in 2014.
The Novoportovskoye oil and gas condensate field in the Yamal Peninsula currently hosts 85 operational wells that produce a light low-sulfur type of oil named Novy Port, Gazprom Neft, the oil producing arm of gas giant Gazprom, said in its statement.
In May of last year, Gazprom Neft started shipping Novy Port oil pumped at the field year-round, not only in summer, after the opening of the Arctic Gates loading and transhipment terminal.
Last month, Gazprom Neft said it had completed drilling of its first production well within the NP-8 stratum at Novoportovskoye. That layer is currently being brought into commercial production, and is expected to deliver around 25 percent of all oil produced at Novoportovskoye over the next three years, and more than 10 percent of all oil produced over the course of field life, the Russian company said.
Apart from the Novoportovskoye field, Gazprom Neft is operating the Prirazlomnoye oil field, Russia's first Arctic oil project.
At the beginning of this year, Gazprom Neft said that it had launched production from two new wells at Prirazlomnoye, bringing the total to six.
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This year, output at Prirazlomnoye is seen at 2.6 million tons of crude, or 19.06 million barrels, despite a three-month technical maintenance shutdown of the same-name platform during the summer. To compare, last year the Prirazlomnaya platform pumped 2.1 million tons of oil, or 15.4 million barrels.
Gazprom Neft reported a net profit of US$3.423 billion (200 billion rubles) for 2016, an 82.5-percent annual surge, due to development of its strategic projects and a rise in Arctic production.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More