S.Donskoy: Russian shelf contains a quarter of all undiscovered oil and gas reserves in the world

The Russian shelf contains up to a quarter of undiscovered oil and gas reserves in the world, Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, S.Donskoy stated ​​on May, 28.

"Russian continental shelf is a provision of new discoveries, one of the most difficult in the world, but it is also one of the richest. According to experts, up to a quarter of undiscovered oil and gas reserves in the world is on the Russian shelf," - he said.

"The brunt of solving difficult problems of shelf geological study will fall on shoulders of our state-owned companies and their partners - we provide expedited licensing of shelf for this purpose, the number of issued licenses on the shelf grew 3 times over the past few years, almost 25% of the total area of the Russian shelf have been licensed already, this is almost 1.6 million square km. License obligations provide enormous volumes of geological exploration - producing companies should carry out 220 ​​thousand linear km of 2D seismic survey, 38 thousand square km of 3D seismic survey, drill 127 offshore wells by 2023. This is a serious problem, but its implementation will allow us to increase exploration degree of the Russian shelf many times and to discover new unique large deposits of oil and gas," - added S.Donskoy.