Lukoil look to the Middle East for growing oil projects while Baker Hughes are not slowing up in the Middle East despite OPEC production cuts
Russia's second-largest oil producer, Lukoil, is looking to the Middle East to expand its operations, a senior executive for the firm said on 29 January. It has been reported that Lukoil is talking to the National Iranian Oil Company to take part in exploration developments in Abe Timur and Mansuri fields in central-western Iran, according to Gati al-Jebouri, VP and head of upstream operations in the Middle East.
"We are in active discussions with them with respect to budget cost structure, and subsequently we will start negotiations on contractual terms if the development plans that we proposed are accepted and agreed by the Iranian party," Jebouri told reporters on Sunday.
Lukoil signed several memorandum of understanding with NIOC last year, and "had site visits and have done significant amount of analysis as to how we potentially can develop the project," he said.
Baker Hughes are also looking to expand in the Middle East, despite the OPEC cuts which came into force at the beginning of the year. "There’s a bit of a disconnect between the OPEC cuts that were announced and what we’re forecasting at least for the next six months in terms of activity," Martin Craighead, CEO at Baker Hughes, told analysts and investors Thursday on a conference call. "We see no pullback that would correlate to the announcement on a production cut. We still expect it to be relatively steady. A couple pockets of the more midsize to smaller players in the Middle East are actually going to increase."
