An aerial view of Rosneft's Vankor oil field in eastern Siberia, about 2,800 km (1,740 miles) east of Moscow.
MOSCOW — Rosneft’s purchase of TNK-BP comes at a crucial time for the Russian oil industry — and for the Kremlin. Russia’s Soviet-era oil legacy is running down.
It’s been a good long run. But if Russia is going to keep up production, it must now move on to places like the Arctic offshore and the remote tundra of East Siberia, places that are colder, harsher, farther out, and in a word, more costly. Russia is not running out of oil, but it is running out of cheap oil.
That’s where Rosneft comes in. By next year it will be the largest publicly traded oil company in the world. With over 54 percent of Russian production, it is the Russian state’s bet on the future. But can Rosneft do it all, even with some of the world’s leading oil companies as its strategic partners?