The Norwegian StatoilHydro Company, which last year was invited by Russia’s Gazprom to develop the northern Shtokman gas field, signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday with Murmansk region, which plans to develop into a major Russian hydrocarbons center due to the major field in the Barents Sea, Itar-Tass reports.
The memo was signed in the presence of Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Ghar Store and regional Governor Yuri Yevdokimov.
Yevdokimov told Store his region pins great hopes on Shtokman and other shelf fields in the northern seas. “The region will become one of the Russian oil and gas centers due to the development of hydrocarbon fields in the Barents and Karsk Seas,” he said.
The site for the production of liquefied natural gas has already been selected and the facility will be erected near the coastal village of Teriberka, a hundred kilometers east of Murmansk. An underwater pipeline from the Shtokman field will also surface in Teriberka, the governor said.
The development of Prirazlomnoe oil field will provide crude to Murmansk seaports for export to Europe and the United States, Yevdokimov said.
Murmansk will develop into a major transportation hub and the Russian Railways Company already invested 15 billion rubles in the past five years into the rail infrastructure. The local seaport invested over 800 million rubles in its expansion and currently operates three oil terminals that annually load over 10 million tons of crude from Siberian and Arctic fields.
Store said in an interview with Tass late in December that 2007 “was successful for Russian-Norwegian bilateral relations”.
“We have boosted our trade relations in 2007. Gazprom invited the StatoilHydro Company to participate in developing the Shtokman deposit,” he said, stressing that “this opens an additional potential for further cooperation between the two countries in the energy sector”.