Russian oil - a second peak

This is the second Russian Peak. The first was created by Ronald Reagan when he drove oil down to $18 a barrel and broke the Soviet Union's foreign-exchange back. We spent them into the ground in an arms race and with "the Contras". And we took away their cash flow. Voila! An end to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The U.S.S.R. collapsed and with it, oil production. It did really get fired up again till the late 1990 with the likes of Berezovsky... And the the U.S. government and Wall Street (with a little help from Al Gore) looted the newly-capitalized Russian Federation to the point where the currency collapsed and there were credible reports that human flesh was being sold in butcher shops in Moldova.

My reportage of that looting got me invited to an economic conference conducted by the Ministry of Finance in Moscow in 2001. 

And guess what? Old Vlad Putin is planning on a massive military buildup, to waste what oil they have left

Of course it is possible to talk more candidly about Russia's problems than about those of the West.

Russian Oil Boom’s End Means Lower Tax That Risks Unrest: Energy

Bloomberg,

21 February, 2012

Russia’s 12-year oil boom is nearing its peak, forcing the next president to decide whether to cut taxes and revive production or use the windfall from $100 oil to boost public spending and quell mounting unrest.

As Vladimir Putin campaigns for a second stint in the Kremlin, the nation’s existing fields are losing pressure and oil companies OAO Rosneft, OAO Lukoil and TNK-BP (BP/) say production taxes give little incentive to invest. Since Putin first became president in 2000, crude output has grown 57 percent to 10 million barrels a day, surpassing Saudi Arabia and flooding the state treasury.

“The cream has been skimmed off the top,” said Leonid Fedun, the billionaire deputy chief executive officer of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company. “Further steps require taxes based on different principles,” or production will start falling within three years, he said.

Any cuts in the oil and gas industry’s 5.64 trillion rubles ($190 billion) in taxes mean less cash to combat the biggest anti-government protests since the 1990s. Deputy Energy Minister Sergey Kudryashov said Feb. 2 the need to strike a balance between revenue and oil output levels is one of the most difficult questions facing the state.

“Being the world’s largest energy producer keeps Russia at the top table of global politics, that’s why it is non- negotiable,” Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Moscow-based investment bank Troika Dialog, said in a phone interview. “While a lot of rhetoric will be about reform and diversification, maintaining oil output is so important that it doesn’t have to be stated.”

Opinion Polls

Putin, seeking a return to the presidency in March 4 elections, leads polls with about 55 percent voter support, according to a survey of 1,600 voters by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov polled 9 percent and Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the nationalist Liberal Democrat Party 8 percent.

The oil and gas industry accounted for almost 50 percent of the state’s income in 2011, and Rosneft’s tax bill last year ran to about half its $92 billion revenue.

Russia’s Soviet-era Siberian fields are maturing, and producers face eroding profitability related to the higher cost of maintaining output. Crude extraction in the Khanty Mansiysk region of western Siberia, which began in 1964 and now contributes roughly half of Russia’s oil, fell 1.7 percent in 2010, according to the regional government’s website.

Declining Prospects

The prospect of decline can be seen on the Moscow stock exchange. Rosneft, the state-controlled company that’s the biggest oil producer, dropped 17 percent in Moscow trading over the past year, a time when crude prices gained by 13 percent to about $120 a barrel.

The Moscow-based company was downgraded at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and Troika Dialog this year on concern capital spending is rising on fields and refineries as production stalls.

“We have difficulty finding catalysts for the stocks amid elevated capex levels,” analysts at Troika said. Lukoil slid 4.3 percent during the past year, while TNK-BP gained 3.2 percent.

Oil producers want tax breaks to boost returns from bringing new fields online and spending on existing deposits. Rosneft has pushed for tax breaks before deciding to develop the Yurubcheno-Takhomskogo site in East Siberia. OAO Gazprom (GAZP) Neft, the oil arm of the world’s largest gas producer, has threatened to slow work on three remote fields because of taxes.

Tax Talks

Talks on tax reform are unlikely to produce a windfall for the oil companies, as the state will take as much as it can without ruining investment, said Eric Kraus, an asset manager at Nikitsky Capital. At the same time, Russian oil producers are a low-risk investment because taxes rise and fall with crude, Kraus said. The state bears price risk, he said.

The stocks with the highest dividends are the best picks, such as preferred shares in OAO Surgutneftegas, TNK-BP, and OAO Bashneft, Kraus said. They are “pretty much the only thing in Russian equity which pays its own rent,” Kraus said. The Surgutneftegas preferred stock traded today at its highest since January 2008.

Without tax holidays five years ago Russia would already be in decline, Lukoil’s Fedun said.

Russia used windfall revenue to build two oil funds to more than $225 billion in December 2008, cash Putin used to bail out the banking industry during the global credit crunch and fund deficits that grew from increased spending on weapons, pensions and railways.

Oil Reserve Funds

Putin, who wants a return to the presidency after four years as prime minister, is unlikely to receive a second oil windfall. Reserves in the two funds dropped to $150 billion at the end of January.

“Two to three percentage points of our annual growth used to come from the oil and gas sector,” then Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said during a meeting with members of Putin’s All- Russia People’s Front in June. “That’s just gone now.”

Russia’s strategy to keep output above 10 million barrels a day for the next decade will initially depend on its ability to increase the amount recovered from existing fields, Kudryashov said. No major projects are scheduled to come on stream in the next four to five years, he said.

Pinning Hopes

After that, Russia is pinning its hopes on the development of untapped deposits in eastern Siberia and the Arctic. The state will create a special regime for its offshore deposits, Kudryashov said.

Reductions in tax rates on crude exports, introduced last year, which increased profitability of mature deposits, have helped. Producers’ ability to slow decline rates at older fields underpinned Russia’s surprise record output last year, Troika Dialog wrote in research on Jan. 10. The bank expects the trend to continue and forecasts marginal output growth this year to 10.4 million barrels a day.

It may be difficult for companies to sustain this without accelerating developments, said Alexei Kokin, an analyst at Uralsib Financial Corp. said.

Forecasts for a plateau in oil production around current levels for the next decade “may be a bit optimistic,” said Kokin. “All the risks are to the downside.”