India’s state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp wants to eventually receive a share of crude from a Russian project it partly owns, but is willing to wait because Russian oil is hard to ship right now, the head of ONGC’s overseas investment arm, ONGC Videsh, said on Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last year removed an Exxon Mobil subsidiary as operator of the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project in Russia’s Far East and transferred it to a new operator. ONGC Videsh has since regained its 20% stake in the project and is in talks with Russian government officials and company shareholders to resume taking oil under a production-sharing arrangement, said Rajarshi Gupta, CEO of ONGC Videsh.