Work begins on Russia’s largest oil terminal

Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft has begun work on its Sever Bay terminal in preparation for the immense Vostok oil project, Total investment is estimated to be as high as €140 billion.

The idea to start the Vostok Oil project was proposed in 2019 by the CEO of Rosneft, Igor Sechin. The project is meant to nominally unite the largest oil and gas fields located in the north of Krasnoyarsk Territory and create a unified infrastructure for their development and for oil transportation.

The Vostok Oil project requires the construction of an unprecedented amount of infrastructure. The project plans include drilling 6,500 wells and installing 5.5 thousand km of pipelines.

Construction has already been completed of two airfields, a sea terminal with oil transfer capacity of up to 100 million tons per year, electric power supply lines and road infrastructure.

The company is also building 10 ice-class tankers, with strengthened hulls and engines powerful enough to push through ice floes, to transport the oil to Europe and Asia.

From an offshore perspective, some 770km of pipeline will be laid to deliver the oil to the terminal from up to 15 Vostok oil fields in northern Siberia.

Work will soon start on preparing the sea channel and the port site. When complete, the terminal will handle oil production from the vast Vostok field, which is expected to deliver 25 million tonnes of oil by 2025 and 100 million tonnes by 2030.

With 400,000 workers expected to be employed during the development of the project, the Vostok development represents one of the largest oil project investments in Russian history.

The development of Vostok and the construction work in the Arctic has attracted criticism from environmental groups. However, Rosnef has claimed that the Vostok Oil is “environmentally friendly” and that it has “a very small hydrocarbon footprint”. Furthermore, the oil installations will reportedly be powered by wind turbines and gas from the field.

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