Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed Russia's first shipment of Arctic offshore oil today.
Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of Russia's top gas producer Gazprom, shipped the first 70,000 tonnes of oil by tanker from the Prirazlomnoye platform, the site of a protest by 30 Greenpeace activists who were arrested last year.
The launch of oil production in the Arctic, seen by Russia as one of the key sources in the gradual replacement of output from its depleted West Siberian fields, has long been delayed due to cost overruns and technical difficulties.
Russia's oil output stands at over 10 MMb/d, the world's largest, but it needs new sources of crude oil, including hard-to-recover deposits and the Arctic, to sustain this level.
