Ministry of Natural Resources has represented the program of resource base reproduction
The Ministry of Natural Resources offers to allocate 3.057 trillion rubles before 2020 to the program of resource base reproduction and use and subsoil geological exploration. The awaited growth in reserves will be 6.01 billion tons of oil, 12.6 trillion cubic m of gas, 7.12 billion tons of coal, 106,000 tons of uranium, 4,072 tons of gold, and 1.6 billion tons of iron ore. The estimated growth in subsoil cost concerning global market prices for the major sorts of minerals (oil, gas, uranium, coal) will be over 173 trillion rubles.
The Ministry of Natural Resources suggests to allocate 359.287 billion rubles from the federal budget, 4.180 billion rubles from the consolidated regional budgets, and 2.693 trillion rubles from the funds of legal bodies, within reproduction of mineral reserves base of common-spread minerals. Hydrocarbons mineral reserves base reproduction will share 2.414 million rubles from all financing sources, including 144.43 billion rubles from the federal budget.
Besides from that, they are going to analyze within the program the opportunity for the allocation of additional resources at a rate of 46.8 billion rubles, including 13.1 billion rubles to realization of the measures for mineral reserves base reproduction in 2013-2015 in accordance with the parameters of the long-term state program for subsoil exploration and reproduction of the mineral reserves base. Realization of the corresponding measures with provide additional growth by 5 billion tons in oil equivalent of explored hydrocarbon reserves, 200 million tons of coal, 40,000 tons of uranium, 80 tons of gold, 15,000 tons of silver, 2.2 million tons of copper, 30,000 tons of chrome ore, and 200,000 tons of rare-earth metals.
The program for mineral reserves base reproduction and use and subsoil geological exploration is a part of the project of the state program ‘Mineral reserves base reproduction and use for 2013-2020’ elaborated by the Ministry. The total proposed volume of the program financing is 3.628 trillion rubles. The project will be discussed in the near future at the governmental session.
Earlier the Russian subsoil use management agency stated the danger of decline in minerals production in Russia due to the decline in geological exploration and insufficient reproduction and compensation of reserves. The agency reports that since 2005 growth in hydrocarbons reserves exceeds their annual production. In 2005-2011, oil and gas condensate production was 3.2 billion tons, and compensation in reserves was 4.7 billion tons. As for gas, the indices were correspondently 4.2 trillion cubic m and 5.4 trillion cubic m. However, the new discoveries compensate not more than 30-50% of production of the major mineral sorts in Russia, and the rest is provided by supplementary exploration, re-estimation of active and earlier discovered deposits.
Translated by Nadezhda Poltoratskaya
