Focus of the issue: replenishment of stocks
Eurasian Consortium. Kazakhstan Suggested the Investors to Look for the Second Kashagan on Shore History Repeats Itself in a Spiral
Oleg ChervinskyHistory keeps repeating itself like a spiral.
Twenty years ago the head of the State Company Kazakhstankaspiyshelf Mr. Baltabek Kuandykov was behind the creation of the international Consortium for the exploration on the shelf of the Kazakhstan sector of the Caspian Sea.
In 1993, Kazakhstan desperately needed oil money to prevent the collapse of the national economy that suddenly became sovereign. So Mr. Kuandykov, heading the Working Group, has negotiated with investors, choosing among them the ones who were most technologically advanced, financially stable and willing to take risks. In 2013, when the North Caspian Consortium gave the first thousands of barrels of oil from the offshore Kashagan field, the Government thought about the future of onshore projects.
Almost all the large deposits on land, where the national company KazMunayGas works, passed the peak of their production, and are now at the stage of recession. And the problem is not only economic, but political. For example, the social well-being of the entire region depends on the production of Ozenmunaygas. And now it seems that Mr. Baltabek Kuandykov, who heads a private exploration company Meridian Petroleum and Kazakhstan Association of Petroleum Geologists, will be entrusted with the creation of a new Consortium with the conventual name of Eurasia.
The project’s presentation took place in the early October in Astana within the framework of the international forum KAZENERGY and caused a heated dispute. Some Russian experts with whom we were able to speak immediately after the presentation perceived skeptically the original idea. In their view, in the Soviet times the Caspian basin was studied by geologists, let’s say "from top to bottom", the data was interpreted quite strictly, the promising ones were realized and it is not worth expecting for new findings there.
Our oil companies are more optimistic in projections. Mr. Baltabek Kuandykov believes that the resource potential of the Caspian region, especially of Caspian oil and gas condensate province, amounts to 40 billion tons of equivalent fuel. "We forecast here about two dozens of large hydrocarbon deposits with reserves of more than 300 million tons," he says. What is this confidence based on?
Let’s go for a depth!
"For a long time, land geological surveys remained out of sight, because all the time the attention was focused on the shelf," the Deputy Chairman of the Board of KMG, Mr. Kurmangazy Iskaziyev, says. -Today, the national company KazMunayGas has completed a three-year analysis project, synthesis of geological and physical materials on all the 15 sedimentary basins of Kazakhstan. The most promising areas are pointed.
The results of exploratory wells including the land show that KMG "changes views at the geology aspects, within the basins it refers to Mangyshlak and Caspian ones." In particular, great discoveries are not foreseen more at the depth of up to 2 thousand kilometers. “We are ready to continue laying of exploratory wells at the depth of up to 5.5 kilometers, and assume the presence of large concentrations of hydrocarbons in Triassic or even Paleozoic sediments,” Mr. Kurmangazy Iskaziyev, who is responsible for exploration in the national company, says.
"At the land we expect large multiple replacement of reserves by increasing the depth of the researches. Today we think and believe, basing on the materials’ analysis that we go to the depths of 5 to 8 kilometers. This is quite a serious request, but we are confident in our success,” Mr. Iskaziyev underlines.
The KMG's position is also shared by the relevant Ministry. "The Caspian basin is a large sedimentary basin, which, in our view and the view of specialists, has great prospects and great potential for hydrocarbon generation, but to date we have carried out surveys and explored just so-called cutoff zones of the basin, where we were technologically able to drill until the depths of 5 or 6 thousand meters,” the Minister of oil and gas of Kazakhstan, Mr. Uzakbai Karabalin, considers.