Samotlor Field is the largest

oil field A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface accumulation of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. Such reservoirs form when kerogen (ancient plant matter) is created in surrounding rock by the prese ...

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

and the sixth largest in the world, owned and operated by

Rosneft PJSC Rosneft Oil Company ( stylized as ROSNEFT) is a Russian integrated energy company headquartered in Moscow. Rosneft specializes in the exploration, extraction, production, refining, transport, and sale of petroleum, natural gas, and pet ...

. The field is located at Lake Samotlor in

Nizhnevartovsk Nizhnevartovsk ( rus, Нижневартовск, p=nʲɪʐnʲɪˈvartəfsk) is a city in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra, Russia. Since the 1960s, the Western Siberian oil boom has led to Nizhnevartovsk's rapid growth from a small settlem ...

district,

Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra, also known as Khanty-Mansia (Khantia-Mansia), is a federal subject of Russia (an autonomous okrug of Tyumen Oblast). It has a population of 1,532,243 as of the 2010 Census. Its administrative center is lo ...

Tyumen Oblast Tyumen Oblast () is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject (an oblast) of Russia. It is located in Western Siberia, and is administratively part of the Ural Federal District. The oblast has administrative jurisdiction over two autonomous ...

. It covers . The field is

History

The field was discovered in 1965. Development started in 1967 and first oil was produced in 1969. Discovery of this field had changed

from a small nearby village into a busy oil city as Samotlor used to be the most important oil production base of the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. After breakup of the Soviet Union the field was owned by Samotlorneftgaz and TNK-Nizhnevartovsk, which later formed TNK-BP. Over the all development period a total of 2,086 well clusters (containing more than 17,000 wells) have been built and about 2.6 billion tons of oil has been produced. The peak production occurred in 1980 when Samotlor produced 158.9 million tons of oil (). The production has been in decline ever since, although according to TNK-BP the field production has stabilized over the past last years after.

Reserves

The in-place oil reserves of the Samotlor field were equal to and as of 2009 estimated at . The proven reserves are approximately . The field is 80% depleted with water-cut up to 90%. At the end of the 1990s, production rate dropped to . However, through an aggressive exploration program and application of cutting-edge technologies TNK-BP had raised production up to . Up to 2012, TNK-BP plans to invest US$1 billion per year for maintaining oil production in it at the level of 30 million tons per year.

In media

The oil processing plant in

is the scene of (but referred to by location rather than directly by name) the beginning of

Tom Clancy's ''Tom Clancy's'' is a branding used by video game company Ubisoft for a series of video games, most of which are based on the works of American author Tom Clancy. Various sub-series are often unrelated to each other with a few exceptions, althou ...

1986 novel ''

Red Storm Rising ''Red Storm Rising'' is a war novel, written by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond, and released on August 7, 1986. Set in the mid-1980s, it features a Third World War between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact forces, and is notab ...

''.

References

Sources

*Kramer, Andrew E. "Mapmakers and Mythmakers: Russian Disinformation Practices Obscure Even Today's Oil Fields," ''New York Times'' (1 December 2005): C1. {{Authority control Oil fields of Russia Oil fields of the Soviet Union Rosneft oil and gas fields