“Our recoverable oil reserves are about 29 billion tons. These are the ones that could theoretically be extracted from the subsoil. Crude oil production (without condensate) preliminarily amounted to about 505 million tons in 2015. Such reserves will last for 57 years,” the head of the ministry Sergey Donskoy told Rg.ru. “However, the volume of proved reserves (we know exactly their whereabouts, quantity and how to extract them), according to experts, is only half of that, about 14 billion tons. The proved reserves will last for only 28 years,” he added. According to Donskoy, Russia’s oil production will inevitably start to decline by 2020. The share of hard to extract oil will grow, as traditional resources will start to deplete. This will also make the extraction more expensive, he said. “That’s why we won’t stop the exploration work,” Donskoy added. Oil exploration is complicated by collapsing crude prices that […]