Gazprom is to benefit from a 5% a drop in tax on to on two of its Arctic deposits after complaints about the cost of extraction.
The Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment confirmed the tax rate on the deposits was to come down from 15% to 10% on the Prirazlomnoye and Kirinskoye fields.
The decision comes as a response to the Russian state-owned consortium’s long plea for lower tax on resource extraction, due to the high costs of work on deposits in the Russian Arctic.
Gazprom expects to extract more than 700,000 tons of oil from the Prirazlomnoye oil deposits in the Pechorskye Sea by the end of next year, with the reserves of the 24-year-old find estimated at 72million tons.
The other area granted the relief will be the Kirinskoye field in the Sea of Okhotsk, which is the base for the Sachalin-3 gas project.
The reserves were estimated at 453million tons of oil and gas condensate. The estimated 720billion cubic m of natural gas from the deposit supplies the major Sakhalin–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok pipeline.