>
>>Yukos to continue shipments of crude to US
>
>So what's the state of oil politics in Russia these days? Are Russians
>angling to replace Saudi Arabia as the swing producer? Do they want to use
>production to get political leverage, or do they just want to make lots of
>money? If the U.S. gets its hands on Iraq's spigots, and Russia is more or
>less friendly, the Saudis will find themselves rather less important.
>
>Doug
There are articles about it all over the Russian press, and in quite a few Western media outlets as well... it's considered a pretty big deal. My impression is that the government wants Russia to became a main oil supplier to the West (it already supplies something like half of the EU's gas), and is using incentives to get the oligarchs who run most of the oil companies to go along with it. The primary motivation, as usual with the Putin regime, is economic; its the natural-resource exporters that fill the government's coffers. The oligarchs, of course, want to inflate their already enormous bank accounts. Exporting natural resources is the only way to profit from them in Russia, since they are sold domestically far, far below market rates (Gazprom basically subsidizes the whole economy), and the US is of course a huge oil importer.
The question is, will this really be profitable enough for Russian oil companies to do? It is already expensive to drill for oil in Russia, and with the transport costs, they estimate that export to the States will only be profitable if oil is over something like $21 a barrel.
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