Volga Gas said it continues to make progress on several fronts with its Russian assets, and said production is currently being restrained to introduce a new process, but still rose year-on-year, Alliance News reported on July 11, 2017.
The company revealed earlier this month that production in the 1st 6 months of 2017 had risen to 6,168 barrels of oil equivalent per day from 5,933 barrels daily the year before.
Production was hampered in the 1st half by another abnormally mild winter between January and April, causing ground conditions close to the group's oil field in the routes used by its customers' oil tanker trucks being unpassable, leading to significant periods in which the oil production was shut in and actual output was below management's expectations.
However, Volga said the impact on total production was not significant.
Volga Gas said that underlying productive capacity of the existing production wells remains in excess of 8,000 barrels per day, but said the throughput at the gas processing plant was reduced during the transition to the new Redox based gas sweetening process.
The new process has now been introduced at the Dobrinskoye gas plant to increase profitability and reduce waste, and processing throughput is now set to rise back to the planned 1.0 million cubic metres per day of gas.
The plant had been running at or close to that desired rate since July 2016, Volga said.
However, following successful industrial testing during May 2017, in June the gas processing plant switched entirely to Redox-based gas sweetening.
While the change in process did not require extensive new construction at the plant, minor modifications and additional items of equipment are required, and while these were installed, production capacity has been temporarily reduced.
The other key development at the gas plant is the construction of cryogenic separation of liquid petroleum gases, which is currently either flared or included with the sales gas.
The majority of long lead items of equipment have been delivered and construction has commenced, and the LPG project is expected to be commissioned during the 4rth quarter of 2017 within the $5 million budget.
Initial estimates put the potential additional reserves at between 250,000 and 500,000 barrels of recoverable oil, which Volga said would be a useful addition to the oil reserves which stood at 5.4 million barrels at the end of 2016, but only a minor increment at the group level.
