Rosneft is to invest more than $30billion in exploration projects in Siberia and the Russian Far East over the next five years, chief executive Igor Sechin has announced.
The five-year investment plan will include building a new $5.4billion refinery in Vladivostok, along with an LNG plant in a joint venture with Japanese firm Marubeni.
“In the next five years, with your support, and given that the tariff policy and the tax regime stabilize, our investment in East Siberia and the Far East in a conservative scenario may total 1 trillion rubles,” Sechin said in a video conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The Russian state-owned oil giant already plans to spend $830million this year on searching for new deposits and exploration in the Far East, and upwards of $700million on redevelopment of the Komsomolsk refinery on the Amur River bank.
Together with Gazprom, Rosneft is the biggest consortium working in Russian Far East. Both companies have appealed to the Russian government for lowering tax on the oil industry to stimulate new investment in the country.
Meanwhile notorious Russian punk band Pussy Riot has launched an attack on Russia’s oil chiefs in a new music video.
The video, entitled “Like a Red Prison”, shows four members of the feminist performance group climbing rigs and pipelines and pouring oil over a portrait of Sechin.
Two of the band members are still in jail over a protest in Moscow’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral in February 2012.
Watch the video below.