You're reading: EU bans selling Russia equipment for extracting arctic, hard-to-recover, deep-sea oil

The European Union has introduced a ban on supplying Russia with high-tech equipment for extracting arctic, deep-sea shelf and shale oil, the EU Official Journal said.

Administrative procedure is applied on exports of dual-purpose products, while special oil equipment supplies are banned completely.

“The competent authorities of the Member States shall not grant any authorisation for any sale, supply, transfer or export of the technologies or the provision of the services <…> if they determine that the sale, supply, transfer or export concerned or the provision of the service concerned is destined for deep water oil exploration and production, arctic oil exploration and production or shale oil projects in Russia,” the EU Official Journal reads.

The blacklist includes a wide range of oil country tubular goods, namely seamless tubes, drill and casing pipes, tubing pipes; equipment for drilling and construction of wells; mobile drilling rigs; floating and underwater platforms for exploration and production, as well as light marine vessels, fire-fighting vessels, floating cranes, and other auxiliary vessels (excluding dredging vessels, floating and underwater platforms, fishing vessels and warships).

Hydrocarbon production with the use of floating and underwater complexes has just started to develop in the world. Russia doesn’t use floating or underwater systems for crude oil production. The first and only gas production complex was installed by Gazprom in the Kirinskoye gas and condensate field in the Sea of Okhotsk, 28 kilometers to the northeast offshore Sakhalin Island, in 2013.