RIA Novosti has held a round-table conference on prospects of petroleum industry in Russia today. The country has set a 25-year record of oil extraction, reaching 10.53 million barrels daily. A greater extraction rate was only registered in 1988. The International Energy Agency predicts that oil supply will exceed demand in 2014 due to increasing oil extraction beyond the OPEC in the past 20 years.
Tamara Kandelaki, director of the Oil and Gas Institute named after academician L.S. Leybenzon, said that oil extraction could be reduced, selling extracted fuel at a good prices and investing more in refinement. She believes that more finances should be invested into petrochemistry, development of science and institutes.
Vasily Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of the Institute for Problems of Oil and Gas of the RAS, noted that development of sciences allowed the US to extract over 40% of shale gas.
Yuri Stankevich, head of the Committee for Energy Policy and Energy Efficiency of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, agrees that petrochemical industry needed more attention, making gas chemistry more efficient. He noted that the best oil sources were being exhausted and the recent increase of extraction came from hydraulic fracturing. Western states use more conventional methods, such as increase rising pressure of water and gas.
