Boris Nikitin: easy life in oil and gas mining is over

The international congress CITOGIC-2009 stands for the work for the future and for solution of difficult tasks, which the oil-gas branch faces now. This is the opinion of the President of Russian Academy of technological sciences Boris Nikitin. The 19th congress “CITOGIC-2009” is held in Ufa today.

“I can definitely say that life is being changed and not for the better. New problems arise and we have to solve them” – Boris Nikitin said – “For example, oil and gas mining becomes more complicated. Earlier we’ve never talked about hard-to recover reserves, we simply didn’t know what did that mean. But today we even begin to think about hydrates. The reserves of hydrates make up many million cubic meters. For instance, I take part in development of the Usinsky oil deposit. The coefficient of oil recovery there is 0,1, i.e. oil reserves are estimated at 600 million tons but we can recover only 60 million and this is exactly what we are moving to because easy life in oil and gas mining is over”.

Other perspective directions for today are liquefied and compressed gas but according to M-r Nikitin there are no serious designs in this sphere in Russia yet. One more theme, which needs to be thoroughly investigated, is the usage of nanotechnologies. It is not accidentally that “CITOGIC” and the Congress of nanotechnologies are held in this year on one site at one time. The main sense of such forums is the joint search for the solutions of the arising problems and specialists expect the forum in Ufa will be useful.