Russia's oil production will fall by 5-20% by the end of this decade as the withdrawal of international companies reduces the ability of the Russian industry to utilize technically complex resources.
Source. Bloomberg writes about this with reference to a study by the consulting company Yakov and Partners, the successor to McKinsey, which left the Russian market due to the war in Ukraine.
Russian extraction technologies are too outdated, and the lack of Western expertise jeopardizes current and future projects.
The company expects that without replacing Western technologies, oil production in Russia will fall, and by 2030 it will be reduced in the range of 5 to 30% and will amount to 409 million tons per year, or about 8.2 million barrels per day. For comparison, before the war, Russia produced about 11 million barrels of oil per day.
"The absence of domestic high-tech oil services creates risks for 20% of production by 2030," said Andrei Streltsov and Gennady Masakov, analysts at the company.
The McKinsey heirs believe that Russian technology is not enough to develop new fields, whose reserves are considered hard to recover. The company cites data showing that about 52% of projects using hydraulic fracturing technology depend on foreign technology from "unfriendly countries." The situation is even worse when it comes to offshore production, where the share of foreign technology reaches 80%, and in the case of floating drilling rigs – 90%.
Analysts estimate that about 1,500 drilling rigs are currently in use in Russia, 40% (600 units) of which are already seriously outdated.
Earlier, the Russian authorities announced that in March, total oil production in Russia would be reduced by 500 thousand barrels per day.
Background. For more information on how Russia continues to lobby for the interests of its oil industry on the world stage, see Mind's article "Lobbyists for the price of oil: the Kremlin is trying to circumvent sanctions by "arming" young technocrats with Western education".