Small oil producers offered small business status 💼

Independent oil producers are planned to be separated into a separate category and given access to support measures that were previously closed in the oil and gas sector.

➡️ The key idea is a register of independent companies and their inclusion in the strategic planning system of the industry. Those included in the register will be able to apply for small and medium business tools: concessional loans, subsidies, preferences. The policy is proposed to be overseen by the Ministry of Energy.

A separate issue is equal access to trunk pipelines and gathering points. Without a pipeline, the profitability of small projects is questionable.

The scale of the sector is still modest:
• about 250 small oil producers in Russia
• ~20 million tons per year, about 4% of national production
• in Tatarstan over three months — 1.6 million tons out of 8.7 million, almost 20% of the regional volume

The main constraining factor is the tax burden, which poorly accounts for the specifics of small fields. Hence the proposal to transfer such companies to the additional income tax (AIT) and redistribute part of the mineral extraction tax (MET) in favor of the regions, so that local authorities have an incentive to support small producers.

The idea is not new:
Back in the 2015 interagency protocol, classification criteria for independent oil companies were formulated — but it never went beyond recommendations. The basic legal problem remains: the concept of "independent oil company" still has no legally defined definition, and it is difficult to provide targeted support to something that is not legally described. A logical first step would be an audit of small and very small fields: according to estimates by Academician A. E. Kontorovich, we could be talking about 3–4 billion tons of recoverable reserves, potentially of interest specifically to small companies.

❔ Will the initiative lead to concrete measures or will it once again remain at the discussion level?

In global practice, independent companies are considered drivers of competition: in the US there are thousands of them, and they once drove the shale revolution. In Russia, there are currently about a hundred such players — and whether the reserves of fields that are uninteresting to large vertically integrated oil companies will be brought into circulation depends on the real interest of the state.

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