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Ukrainian Oil

June 1st, 2010 admin No comments

Ukrainian Oil

Ukrainian Oil and Gas Potential to Increase Ukrainian National Oil and Gas Production the Decades to Come

Ukraininan Offshore – The Back Sea a new world class frontier with a waste amount of exploration opportunities

The Ukrainian part of the Black Sea has had production for centuries; however it has been confined to shallow water on the shelfal areas of the Black Sea. Mainly the Odessa and Kerch areas of the Ukrainian Black Sea have been exploited so far.

However, the prospectivity of the Ukrainian sector of Black Sea has been known for a long time, it is only now after around 17000 km of speculative 2D seismic the industry really can see its potential revealed.

The offshore potential for Ukraine is enormous as we can see from mapped out leads and prospects in its territory.

Vanco was awarded the first of the three offshore license acreages, called, Prykerchencska, Forosa and Skifska. Prykerchenska license area contains around 32 leads and prospects where 7 are in syn-rift sediments and rest 25 are in the Sudak trend. In Forosa there are mapped 11 leads and prospects as for in Skifska there are 15 of them.

Only in the license acreage made available to the industry there are more than 50 prospects and leads, which amounts up to billions of barrels of oil eqvivalents.

In other areas of the Ukrainian sector of the Black sea we see a hugh potential in mapped out prospects and leads. In the Kalamytsko central high theree are mapped out 17 prospects and leads in various settings. In the Kraevoy Spur there are additional 12 prospects and leads. The Lower Danube trough contains around 4 potential prospects and in Karkinitsko – the northern Crimea trough, also called the Odessa shelf area there are mapped out 26 prospects. Both Shatsky ridge and Andrusov ridge has 2 prospects each as for the Eastern Black Sea Depression contain 3 of them.

In the Kerch-Taman trough there is identified 20 prospects and leads to be followed up on.

In summary for the offshore area of Ukrainian oil and gas province, there are around 143 various prospects and leads to be followed up with more seismic and potential drilling. The resource estimate is in several billion barrel level. It is therefore right to assume that Ukrainian sector of the Black Sea is a world class oil and gas province, only waiting to give its first hydrocarbon away to the society.

The prospectivity level is high, as for the potential it speaks for itself. However most of the prospectivity is located in deep water environment (in excess of 1000 meters water depth) and require the knowledge of these operational environment. However exploration offshore Brazil, Africa and in the Caspian Sea has shown us that this is no limitation any longer for the industry. With oil prices in excess of 115 USD/bll it makes way for tremendous projects in this region of the world.

Onshore Southern Ukraine there are lots of opportunities as well. In the Kiliysko-Zmeinoye high area there are mapped out 9 prospects and leads, as well as 5 prospects and leads to be found in the Krilouskay Depression area. Lastly but not least in the Southern Ukrainian monocline (on the Eastern European platform) there is mapped out around 12 opportunities for prospects and leads as well.

In toal we look at around 170 prospect opportunities where around 140 of them are located in open acreage still. This must be a massive challenge to the Ukrainian authorities as well as the oil and gas industry to exploit and to perform a sensible exploitation strategy for in the next decade to come.

We are sure that this demonstrates the waste potential of the Ukrainian sector of the Black sea together with some onshore potential that will contribute to rank Ukrainian oil and gas production higher in the years to come. However there are still challenges in creating optimized Production Sharing agreements within the country and to make sure as many serious players as possible are given the opportunity to explore the Ukrainian potential in a strategically correct manner.

About the Author

He has a background as civil engineer and geoscientist. He has worked mainly within the oil and gas industry from the mid 1980s. He has written some few fictional novels as well as author of some professional litterature within oil and gas sector, he is now an editor of some web sites, mainly within the travel business.
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