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Russia may exhaust its oil deposits by 2044, and the extraction of conventional reserves will start its decline in 2020, Russian Natural Resources and Ecology Minister Sergey Donskoy said in an interview with rg.ru.
"There is about 29 billion tonnes in recoverable oil reserves. This is what could theoretically be extracted from the subsoil. Production of crude oil (with no gas condensate) amounted to about 505 million tonnes in 2015. If we consider these figures, the discovered reserves will last for another 57 years. However, the volume of confirmed reserves, according to experts, is half as much – about 14 billion tonnes. According to confirmed reserves, oil production will continue for only 28 years," the minister said.
At the same time, there is a growing proportion of scavenger oil reserves, Donskoy said.
Read alsoOil producers announce meeting on output freeze in Qatar on April 17"Putting these reserves into the development is associated with low economic efficiency and requires modernization of technology. Today, the level of their extraction is low. Without new discoveries, the extraction of conventional reserves will begin to decline in 2020. The proportion of scavenger oil will increase and the profitability prospects of these projects will worsen significantly. That is why we are not going to stop exploration," he said.