Russia's two largest oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil, announced a deal late Thursday on joint exploration and production offshore in areas licensed to Rosneft in the Arctic.
The deal also foresees cooperation in a range of other areas, including exploration and production in the Nenets Autonomous Region, marketing oil products and natural gas, and logistics, according to a joint statement.
"Under the current fiscal conditions, and with a limited existing infrastructure and a growing proportion of reserves that are difficult to extract, we need to expand our cooperation by combining efforts to raise the profitability of our projects," Rosneft CEO Eduard Khudainatov said, according to the statement.
"We expect that long-term cooperation with Rosneft will help our company gain access to significant new hydrocarbon reserves in Russia," Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov said.
The companies have agreed to create joint working groups to study areas of cooperation by May 15 and to draw up a list of projects and concrete ways to work together by August 1.
Rosneft has been aggressively pursuing offshore partnerships with foreign majors, and has announced major deals with BP, Chevron and Exxon.
Lukoil has two major offshore projects already producing in Russia, the Korchagin field in the Caspian and the Kravtsovskoye field in the Baltic Sea, and holds licenses to develop several others.
But Lukoil no longer qualifies for new licenses, after a 2008 Russian law was passed that requires offshore fields be developed by state-owned companies. Currently, only state-owned Rosneft and Gazprom are allowed to develop such fields.
