Ukraine has chosen a consortium led by ExxonMobil to explore and develop the Skifske deepwater natural gas field in the Black Sea, rejecting a bid from Russia's Lukoil, environment and natural resources minister Eduard Stavytskiy said Wednesday.
Other companies in the group headed by ExxonMobil are Shell, Romania's Petrom and Nadra Ukrayiny, a Ukrainian state-run company holding licenses for natural resources extraction.
Ukraine earlier this year announced two tenders for the development of the Skifske and Foroske fields, seeking to boost domestic gas output after talks with Russia over lower gas prices had made no progress over the past two years.
No bids were submitted for the development of the Foroske field. The Skifske field, which covers an area of 10,000 sq km in the Black Sea, will probably require investments of between $10 billion and $12 billion, according to the State Geology Service. The field is expected to produce up to 5 billion cubic meters/year of gas.
Ukraine plans to increase gas production to 44 Bcm/year by 2030 from about 20 Bcm in 2011, mostly through the development of shale gas and deepwater gas fields, according to the energy and coal industry ministry.
As part of the strategy, Ukraine in May selected Chevron and Shell as winners of two tenders to develop two shale gas deposits, Olesska and Yuzivska.
Chevron will develop the Olesska area in the Lviv region bordering the European Union, while Shell will focus on Yuzivska in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions bordering Russia.
Ukraine has Europe's fourth-largest shale gas reserves at 42 Tcf, or 1.2 trillion cu m, according to the US state Energy Information Administration, trailing Poland, France and Norway.
