India's ONGC expands Russian footprint

The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation has taken a 15% stake in the Vankor oilfield

India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has taken a 15% stake in Rosneft’s prolific Vankor oilfield as part of its accelerating global expansion drive. The sale price has not been officially announced, but local media reports peg the deal at between $1.275bn and $1.35bn for the East Siberian field, Russia’s biggest discovery in the past 25 years, and smaller clusters. It will be ONGC’s third major investment in Russia’s upstream, after Sakhalin-1, largely considered a success, and its acquisition of Imperial Energy, purchased when oil prices were at a peak, and widely seen as a failure, said Abhishek Agarwal, an India-focused energy analyst at investment bank Macquarie. Given the timi