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Rosneft Patents Environmental Project to Dispose of Drill Cuttings
30 August 2021
Rosneft has secured a patent for a green invention to recycle drill cuttings at the Vostok Oil project. This ground-breaking project to turn drilling waste into a highly environmentally friendly building material has already brought the Company more than 2 billion roubles in economic returns. More than 212,000 tonnes (139,000 cubic metres) of drill cuttings have already been disposed of at the Vankorskoye, Suzunskoye and Tagulskyoe fields.
As part of the Rosneft 2022 Strategy, the Company’s subsidiaries devote special attention to environmental protection in the course of their production activities. The use of green technology is at the heart of field development in the new northern Vostok Oil project. The enterprise has started the process of obtaining two more patents.
The technology is based on the zero-waste principle, organised directly at the cluster pad. The cuttings from drilling wells are mixed with cement, lime, gypsum and sand. Such a formula makes the resulting substrate environmentally friendly. Calcium from lime improves the physical properties of the soil by strengthening its structure and has a positive effect on microflora activity, increasing the organic matter content of the soil, enhancing plant productivity and resilience to all kinds of external factors.
The innovative product is used at Vostok Oil fields for road backfilling, construction of sites for new production complexes, as well as in the remediation process. The recycled soil can also be used as a substitute for natural soils and other remediation materials.
The State Environmental Expertise has confirmed that the production process is safe and that the soil meets all the necessary requirements. The licence, obtained upon inspections by Rosprirodnadzor, gives oil workers the opportunity to extend their own drill cuttings disposal technology to fourteen more sites newly included in the licence, located in the Vankorskoye, Tagulskoye, Suzunskoye and Lodochnoye fields.
Note for Editors:
Vostok Oil is the biggest project both for the national and global economies. Its resource base exceeds 6 billion tonnes of premium low-sulphur oil.
The Vostok Oil project is comprised of 52 license areas located in the north of Krasnoyarsk Territory and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, which accommodate 13 oil and gas fields, including the Vankor (Vankorskoye, Suzunskoye, Tagulskoye and Lodochnoye fields) and Payakh clusters. Since 2009, five fields have been discovered in Taimyr: Baikalovskoye, Gorchinskoye, Ichemminskoye, Novovogennoye and, in December 2020, the unique Zapadno-Irkinskoye field.
Rosneft
Information Division
August 30, 2021