Samotlor Field
Russian oilfield
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Through Russia and Soviet Union
History
The field was discovered in 1965. Development started in 1967 and first oil was produced in 1969. Discovery of this field had changed Nizhnevartovsk from a small nearby village into a busy oil city as Samotlor used to be the most important oil production base of the Soviet Union. After breakup of the Soviet Union the field was owned by Samotlorneftgaz and TNK-Nizhnevartovsk, which later formed TNK-BP.
Over the all development period a total of 2,086 well clusters (containing more than 17,000 wells) have been built and about 2.6 billion tons of oil has been produced. The peak production occurred in 1980 when Samotlor produced 158.9 million tons of oil (7 Mbbl/d or 1.1×106 m3/d). The production has been in decline ever since, although according to TNK-BP the field production has stabilized over the past last years after.
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Reserves
The in-place oil reserves of the Samotlor field were equal to 55 billion barrels (8.7×109 m3) and as of 2009 estimated at 1 billion barrels (160×106 m3). The proven reserves are approximately 44 billion barrels (7.0×109 m3). The field is 80% depleted with water-cut up to 90%.
At the end of the 1990s, production rate dropped to 300,000 barrels per day (48,000 m3/d). However, through an aggressive exploration program and application of cutting-edge technologies TNK-BP had raised production up to 750,000 barrels per day (119,000 m3/d). Up to 2012, TNK-BP plans to invest US$1 billion per year for maintaining oil production in it at the level of 30 million tons per year.
Samotlor field is considered depleted, with its high water-cut and a significant portion of its original reserves already extracted, though new development programs are underway to access remaining hard-to-recover resources. Peak production was in 1980, and by 2024, it was estimated that the field had already recovered about 90% of its total recoverable reserves.
In fiction
The oil processing plant in Nizhnevartovsk is the scene of (but referred to by location rather than directly by name) the beginning of Tom Clancy's 1986 novel Red Storm Rising.