Russia Has 120,000 Oil Wells Yielding 6,000 Tons a Year Each

Russia today is home to approximately 120,000 oil wells, each of which can yield around 6,000 metric tons of petroleum per year, Russian Deputy Natural Resources Minister Ivan Glumov announced.

He said that the oilfields under exploitation now were all discovered back in Soviet times, while development of new deposits was "pursued extremely sluggishly" over the past decade.

In that connection, Glumov said, it takes a lot of effort today for the prospecting for mineral resources to keep up with extraction.

Commenting on the bottom line of Tuesday's Natural Resources Ministry board meeting, the deputy minister said in a statement that if ever Russia faces the threat of a fuel crisis, it is going to happen "in a few hundred years." Russia is the world's second richest country in oil and first in natural gas resources.

Glumov said western Siberia's oil reserves, if appropriately used, may meet Russia's domestic demand for oil for at least another hundred years.