Question of the day: how long will the "oil fairy tale" of Russia last?

Experts have long warned that the oil "fairy tale" in which Russia has been living for more than 50 years, exchanging "black gold" for currency, technology and consumer lifestyle, is approaching the final at an alarming rate. Increased production at old, still Soviet fields leads to their accelerated depletion, and new deposits with cheap and easy-to-extract oil have not been found.

As Novye Izvestia has already reported, at the current level of technology development, recoverable oil reserves in Russia will last for 58 years. This was stated by the head of Rosnedra Yevgeny Kiselev:

“The profitable ones, according to the inventory data, will last for 19 years. But these are conditional, indicative indicators. With the development of technology, this milestone will be constantly pushed back".

In turn, in any scenario, the Russian economy is provided with gas reserves for more than 60 years, Kiselev added.

The main obstacle to the extraction of hydrocarbons from the Arctic shelf, he said, is the low price of oil, since there are still no necessary safe and cheap technologies.

This statement caused some bewilderment on social networks, since the statements are statements, but who will explain what to do to Russia in such a situation. So, experts Telegram channel "Boiler Room", they write:

“It is difficult for us to say why the head of Rosnedra Yevgeny Kiselev and the state media needed such a“ sensation, ”but the practical sense of throwing such information into the public space without professional comments seems to us very doubtful. We hope that the interested forces will be able to somehow concretize the statements of Mr. Kiselev, as well as clarify what the relevant departments think about the terms he named. And if the prospects described by Kiselev are real, then what is being done in order to ensure sustainable development of the country beyond the horizon designated by him..."

It is worth recalling that the same Yevgeny Kiselev spoke on the same topic in 2017:

“At the moment, we have enough oil reserves for 23-25 years at current production levels. But at the same time, every year we will ensure a simple reproduction of reserves. Thus, this bar is constantly being pushed back and corresponds to global levels and even exceeds them, because in fact, keeping the level of availability of reserves at the level of 20 years means capitalizing reserves and diverting money..."

As you can see, contrary to the statements of the official, the milestone is not only not being pushed back, on the contrary, it is approaching: in 2017 it was 23-25 years old, in 2021 - 19 years old.

Even then, analysts of the online edition Finanz.ru warned:

“The authorities openly admit that they are not making any investments in the exploration of new oil fields. “In 2017, not a single auction for the right to use large hydrocarbon blocks will be announced in Russia. Nothing left. The fund of discovered deposits has been exhausted, ”explained the head of Rosnedra Evgeny Kiselev. We decided to just drive everything that can be sold now at the price we have. To pump out everything that is possible from the existing fields.

The peak of production is 2020-22. Then a decline will begin at a rate of up to 10% per year, and by 2035 production volumes will collapse by half - from 11 to 6 million barrels per day. Russia itself consumes such a volume of oil, which means that exports will have to be zeroed out. The country is already poor today (70% of people earn $ 300-500 a month), and by the mid-2020s it will be simply a beggar...

Incidentally, this is not only the opinion of Russian analysts. Back in 2018, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, said that already in the second half of the 2030s, oil production in Russia would drop sharply, and the Russian Federation "may completely disappear from the world (oil) market".