White Sun of the Desert

Zenit St. Petersburg 2 - 0 Glasgow Rangers

Congratulations to Zenit on a deserved win.  My wife was happy this morning.  Let’s hope her husband will be as happy in a week’s time.

After five years of blogging, I think I am now in a position where I can say that I have truly arrived as a blogger.

I am this week’s featured blogger in the Normblog Profile.  You can read my profile here.

Now this has really surprised me:

Russia has waived normal visa requirements for a 72-hour period for football fans with a ticket for the Champions League final in Moscow.

…

Supporters will need to present a valid match ticket, a valid passport, and a completed immigration form upon arrival in Russia, Uefa has confirmed.

I had expected the Russian immigration authorities to be far more pig-headed about it, and they must be congratulated on making this move.  Let’s hope they take it a step further and emulate the Ukrainians after the Eurovision Song Contest by removing the visa requirements for European tourists altogether.

One of the consistent refrains from the left-wing of European politics is that the US government is beholden to the interests of Big Oil, even to the extent that Bush was prepared to invade Iraq on their behalf.  It is not uncommon for advocates of an enlarged and more powerful European Union to cite independence from the US as a major benefit of such a development, presumably including independence from the manipulations of major oil companies.

Anyone interested in the politics of the oil industry, such as I am, wonders why Europeans spend so much time and energy criticising links between the US government and major oil interests, yet emit no more than a squeak when their own governments prostrate themselves in front of foreign oil and gas interests.

First we had Gerhard Schroeder, former Chancellor of Germany, who in November 2005 signed a $5bn agreement with Russia’s Gazprom to supply natural gas:

Officials including Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov presided over the ceremonial welding of the first section of pipe at Babayevo in Russia’s Vologda region, where the Baltic link will diverge from an existing trunk pipeline and head for the coast.

Gazprom has teamed up with Germany’s E.on and Wintershall, part of BASF, to build the pipeline and is looking for a potential fourth partner, although it will retain a controlling stake of 51% in the project.

The onshore section of the pipeline will run 917 kilometres to the port of Vyborg, close to Russia’s second city of St Petersburg. The 1200 kilometre subsea link will terminate at Greifswald in Germany.

Very shortly after he found himself voted out of office, no doubt thankful he’d pushed the deal through for no more than a few weeks later he’d found himself another job:

Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, is to be a director of a Russian-German pipeline consortium controlled by Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled gas group said on Friday.

As I said at the time:

Can you imagine the noise that would be made if the US signed an historic deal to export Alaskan crude to China, and George W. Bush took the reigns of the pipeline consortium weeks after leaving office?

Now if that wasn’t bad enough, Schroeder followed it up with this:

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won a court order today upholding a legal injunction to silence a political opponent who criticised his appointment to a top job at the Russian-led gas North European Gas Pipeline company (NEGP).

Guido Westerwelle, leader of the opposition Free Democrats (FDP), had suggested Schroeder acted improperly in accepting the post of supervisory board chairman of NEGP after he had helped to launch the enterprise while in office.

After Schroeder won a gagging order last month, Westerwelle challenged the ruling, citing his right to freedom of opinion.

A court in the northern city of Hamburg rejected Westerwelle’s objection so if the FDP leader repeats his allegation, he could face a fine of up to €250,000 ($300,000).

Schroeder’s comment?  This:

“I cannot understand this criticism,” Schroeder told a news conference at the headquarters of Russia’s state-controlled gas monopoly Gazprom.

Now in April 2008 we have this, which also seems to be getting very little attention in the international press:

Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller could offer outgoing Italian Premier Romano Prodi a top post with the company South Stream joint venture with Italian energy group Eni, Russian media reported.

News service RIA Novosti said Daily Kommersant quoted a government source as saying that Gazprom may repeat its move to make former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder head of the shareholders’ committee for Baltic pipeline operating venture Nord Stream.

It seems as though there is a route to life after politics for failed left-wing politicians throughout Europe: sign a major pipeline deal with Gazprom in your last days of office, and enjoy a cosy position at the top of the tree in the pipeline consortium a few weeks later.

But far more worrying was this story from January of this year:

The Nord Stream consortium, which is planning to build a subsea gas pipeline from Russia to Western Europe, has called on the European Union executive for help so it can meet its construction schedule.

“If you think it is a done deal you are wrong,” Reuters quoted Wintershall boss Reinier Zwitserloot as telling reporters in Berlin.

“If we want to see gas flow through the pipeline in first half (of) 2011, all the necessary approvals must be obtained by mid-2009, but the EU Commission must help ensure that the project is not blocked by individual countries.”

Nord Stream is majority-owned by Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom, with Wintershall’s parent BASF and fellow German player E.ON owning 20% each. The Netherlands’ Gasunie has the remaining 9% stake.

Here we have a minor stakeholder in a gas pipeline consortium controlled by the non-EU Russian government calling for the EU to forbid individual countries - including those directly affected by the pipeline - from delaying its construction.

Zwitserloot said his frustration stemmed from numerous delays by individual EU countries that should not be tolerated, given a fast-rising gas shortfall in the 27-nation bloc.

The interests of a Gazprom-led pipeline consortium should take precedence over the wishes of the European electorate?

And these are the people who think the US, which regularly rejects applications from US companies to drill their own reserves, has problems with their leaders being in hock to the interests of the oil and gas industry.

Following on from the post immediately below this one, the BBC has a report on the status of the visa issue for British fans wanting to go to the Champions League final in Moscow on May 21st.

Champions League final organisers are moving closer to finalising a solution for English supporters to get “express” Russian visas after meeting in Moscow.

Moving closer to finalising a solution?  They’d better get a move on.  What amuses me is how the Russians have been caught by surprise by all this.  An English team was guaranteed a place in the final following the quarter final results on 9th April, and with Arsenal, Liverpool, and Chelsea all going into the quarter finals with only Fenerbahce as the potential for an upset, it’s been highly likely that an English team will appear in Moscow since the quarter final draw was made on 14th March.  They’ve had six weeks to prepare for this, and only now, less than three weeks before kick-off, are they “moving close to finalising a solution”.  True, the Russians will now have to deal with 50,000 applications rather than the 25,000 they could have anticipated back then, but I think they’d still struggle had only one English team gotten through. 

It has been agreed in principle that match tickets can replace the official invitation usually needed for a visa.

If this actually happens, this will speed things up considerably as obtaining a letter of invitation normally takes at least a week (not to mention the £100 charge plus courier fees).  But I’m not sure I’d be comfortable putting my ticket - which are now valued on the internet at £5,000 each - into the Russian embassy, paper clipped to the back of my visa application form.

Russia is currently in the middle of a three-day public holiday. Its Embassy and Uefa could make an announcement with full details on Sunday 4 May.

That’s right: and we also have another public holiday from 8th to 11th May, which is another four days lost.

Manchester United has said that supporters planning to travel will find it easier than normal to get a visa, suggesting those on charter flights approved by the club would be eligible for special arrangements. 

I’ll believe this when I see it.

And United chief executive David Gill was part of the English delegation which met with Russian officials and Uefa in Moscow on Thursday.

“The visa issue has been there for a while,” he told MUTV before embarking on the trip. “If you are on an organised trip, your ticket will be your visa.  

Not a chance.  The ticket might serve as a letter of invitation, but try presenting your ticket to the Russian immigration official at Domodedovo Airport, and you’ll be going nowhere.

Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzkhov, has promised that the Russian Embassy and relevant authorities will make it easier for fans to get visas.

…

But, as agreed in principle, a match ticket could act as an official invitation - though supporters entering the country will still need to purchase a visa, currently priced at £95.

What remains, crucially, is to finalise how these visas are issued.  

Despite having experienced Russian bureaucratic incompetence for the past four years, I am still amazed they are only now trying to deal with this.

At present fans can apply for a visa through the Russian National Tourist Board in London, which is processing visas exclusively on behalf of the Russian Embassy for the Champions League final.  

This is also typically Russian: whenever things take ages or are in short supply, the reason behind it is usually because someone or some department enjoys a monopoly position at a crucial point in the decision making process.  Usually this is a state department, and is often a nice source of income for the people running it.

Though Russia insists it will ensure fans travelling to the Moscow finals get visas with minimal fuss, it has said the process would have been easier if diplomatic ties with Britain were better.

I like that: it’s not lack of planning or an archaic visa system which is the problem, it is the British government.

Looking at the visa problems, coupled with the severe shortage of hotels in Moscow and the extortionate price of taxis, I’m predicting an utter shambles.

One interesting development running in parallel to this is that Zenit St. Petersburg thrashed Bayern Munich 4-0 on Thursday, setting up a final with Glasgow Rangers on 14th May - in Manchester!  Perhaps if the issue of visas for English fans isn’t settled to the satisfaction of the FA, Zenit fans could find themselves being turned down for visas at the British consulate in St. Petersburg.

My cable TV has been out of action for the past five months, despite the cable company sending people round on no less than five occasions to fix it.  Last time they sent a trio of gormless looking men around, one of whom carried all his necessary tools in a carrier bag, and another who stunk to high heaven.  Sure enough, they left without managing to fix the problem.  I also have a problem with receiving normal terrestrial TV, in that the picture is always terrible no matter how many gormless, smelly men turn up to do something about it.

So as it was I missed the big match last night, and Paul Scholes’ wondergoal which has put Manchester United into the Champions League final against either Liverpool or Chelsea.  Now Man Utd’s win has set up an all-English final, which will be held in Moscow on May 21st.  I do not know what the ticket allocations are, but I assume there is a set number for each team’s supporters and probably a portion which can be bought locally.  Holding the final in Moscow was always going to present serious visa problems for travelling fans, but now it looks as though the problem will be doubled.  Rather than having the fans travelling from two countries and applying through two embassies for their visas, now the Russian embassy in London is going to have to process upwards of 40,000 visas in 3 weeks.  I have no idea how they are going to manage this, short of either waiving the requirements for anyone holding a ticket, or rapidly bringing in extra staff who can cope with the workload.  I can’t see them doing either of these.

Which makes me wonder if there are going to be several thousand very disappointed English football fans left holding useless tickets come 21st May.  Tickets are on sale on the internet now, for a whopping £1,400 and upwards.  I will be monitoring this situation very closely, because I am a Man Utd fan without a ticket, but in possession of a visa and with a place to stay in Moscow.  These two might prove to be harder to get than a ticket after a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping maybe I can pick up a spare one somewhere along the way.

I have had to postpone my trip to Nizhnekamsk, for a reason which is most typically Russian.  Apparently, Nizhnekamsk is a closed city, although I had no difficulty getting in or out or wandering around when I was there four years ago.  This means that there is a law requiring any foreigner staying at a hotel in the city to have an invitation letter from the company they will be visiting, or so our travel agent in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk told us.  So I told them not to assume I am there on business, that I am on vacation.  After much whirring of tiny brains, our travel agent made some enquiries.  Apparently, they will know I am not on vacation because I have a work visa.  Well yes, I said.  That’s because I live and work in Sakhalin.  But can I not go on vacation to Nizhnekamsk?  Of course, our travel agent here could not find enough initiative amongst the whole lot of them to find this out of their own accord, it took several phone calles back and forth before they said that it is illegal for anyone on a work visa to stay in a hotel in Nizhnekamsk without an invitation letter from a company.  If I was on a tourist or business visa, apparently it would be okay.

Personally, I think our travel agent here is telling porkies in order to avoid doing any work or thinking.  They love the easy stuff like flogging tickets from Sakhalin to Moscow, but ask them to help you with anything slightly complicated and you get the usual and repetitive “not possible” response familiar to anyone who’s been in Russia more than five minutes.  The company I am visiting has for some reason struggled to get me this letter, but the travel girl there said she’d spoken to the hotel and said it would be okay if I said I was on vacation.  But I seem to remember me not being allowed to stay in a hotel last time I was there (on a business visa), so I don’t know what to believe.  I’d guess it would be okay if I just turned up, but we would be getting there at half past midnight, and if I couldn’t get a room I would be in the shit.  Nizhnekamsk might have undergone some improvements in recent years, but it’s not a place I’d want to sleep rough.  And arriving at that time means I wouldn’t even be able to get myself an apartment to stay in like I did last time, so I’m pulling the plug on the whole trip until I can get a proper invitation and a hotel booking.

The thing which baffles me the most is why Nizhnekamsk would be a closed city.  The travel agent, almost certainly talking nonsense, said it was because of military installations nearby, but Nizhnekamsk is hardly in a strategic location and Sakhalin, which is one giant military base in a genuinely strategic location, has no such restrictions.  They have a huge chemical plant there, but the one in Angarsk was three times the size and that didn’t stop foreigners checking into hotels there because of it.  The only thing I can think of is that they have an enormous factory there making poor quality tyres for distribution and use across the entire country, and the FSB are concerned that a sneaky foreigner might run off with a Kamaz tyre or two and sell the technology to one of Russia’s many enemies.

What a shambles.

This made me chuckle:

Gazprom is “a bit disappointed” by protracted talks with BP’s Russian venture, TNK-BP, about taking a controlling stake in the Kovykta gas field, the Russian gas giant’s deputy chief executive Alexander Medvedev said today.

“The ministry of resources can call the licence back if conditions are not executed. The ball is not in our court. We are a little bit disappointed,” Reuters quoted Medvedev as telling a briefing.

The ball is not in Gazprom’s court, but if “conditions are not executed”, i.e. TNK-BP doesn’t sell them a controlling stake, then Gazprom will ensure the ministry of resources shuts them down.

There was a time when Russians used to deliver speeches - Khruschev was good at them - as if nobody was around to hear them. It looks as though those times have returned. Either they really don’t give a damn what the world thinks about property rights in Russia, or there were some meaty slaps to foreheads partway through Medvedev’s briefing.

Continuing on from the post two below this one, I should emphasise that the $2.6 trillion required by Gazprom and Rosneft is only that amount needed to develop Russia’s offshore fields. The onshore developments will need separate funding, as this article in Upstream Online tells us:

Russia’s Gazprom Neft is planning to more than double its oil output by 2020 through a series of buy-ups, the oil arm of gas giant Gazprom said in a strategy document released today.

…

Gazprom Neft, which produced around 43 million tonnes of oil last year, flat on 2006, has been fighting declining production since its former owner, billionaire Roman Abramovich, sold the company, then called Sibneft, to the gas giant in 2005, a Reuters report said.

I’ll intervene here to say that Abramovich seems to have made a pretty smart move in flogging off a load of declining oilfields for top dollar. He would have had to invest in them himself to keep up production rates, instead he’s just offloaded them onto Gazprom and walked away with the cash. Nice! Anyway, I digress:

Gazprom Neft, which expects Gazprom to hand over the right to develop all of Gazprom’s 11 oilfields within the next two to three years, has said it plans to invest up to $4 billion per year to 2020, or around $50 billion, to boost output.

…
West Siberia will remain a key region for the company and East Siberia and the northern Nenets region will also be developed.

$4bn per year is one hell of a lot of money for a single company to invest in oil and gas projects, if not much beside the $62bn per year that they say they are going to have to come up with to develop the offshore fields.

To put this in perspective, consider the Sakhalin II project, the largest integrated oil and gas project in the world (by cost), involving Russia’s first offshore platforms and first LNG facility. Put simply, the Sakhalin II project involves the installation and upgrading of an ancient platform they hauled out of some inlet in Canada just to get some sort of production going, followed by the construction and installation of two brand-new modern offshore platforms, an onshore processing facility, two 800km pipelines running in parallel, and a combined LNG plant and oil export terminal. For a more detailed, but still brief overview, go here. Anyway, this project was originally budgetted at $10bn, but the costs have slipped slightly and it’s now looking at coming in at $20bn. The major expenditure on this project has been in the last 4 years during the construction and installation of all these pipelines, facilties, etc., a phase which is due to be complete by the beginning of 2009. So for argument’s sake, and these numbers are rough, let’s take the expenditure as being $16bn over 4 years, which is $4bn per year.

In other words, Gazprom Neft - and this is just the oil arm of Gazprom, not the entire company - thinks it is going to be running projects of the magnitude of the Sakhalin II project from now until 2020, or possibly lots of smaller projects combining to the same value. And this is what is causing me to wonder where these figures are coming from and what they are based on.

Firstly, as the Sakhalin II project has shown, cost and schedule overruns on projects in Russia are serious. There are many reasons why the Sakhalin II project found itself overspent and behind schedule to such a degree, several of which are through the actions of the Russian government. Constantly changing visa laws, dubious customs clearance procedures, Russian content requirements, a restrictive labour code, and selectively applied environmental regulations all combined to add enormous costs to the initial estimates. Some of these obstacles might be removed should a mega-project be run by a state-owned company such as Gazprom or Rosneft, but this is doubtful. Anyone who has worked for a nationalised company in the Middle East will tell you that working on behalf of a government company does not make negotiating the maze of other government departments any easier. It took the government-owned Kuwait Oil Company more than four months to get me a permanent security pass from the state oilfield security police to allow me onto the Burgan oilfield, where I was working daily on a ten month project. The environmental barriers might be pushed aside on a Gazprom project, but I can’t see the customs authorities being any more generous, by which I mean forgoing their unofficial cut, out of solidarity with another state-owned enterprise.

Also important is the fact that the Sakhalin II project overspent and overran partly because of Shell’s failure to manage the project correctly, particularly in their selection of subcontractors and monitoring of progress in the early stages. Shell’s reputation for project management has taken a beating on the Sakhalin II project, and deservedly so in many respects, but it should be understood that the project has been carried out in an incredibly remote and harsh environment with no history of this kind of work being done in the country before. Any company managing this project would have faced the same difficulties Shell has done, and it is very unlikely that any company would have done a much better job. So all things considered, Shell have not made a bad fist of the job. Not too good either, but it’s not a disaster, and in ten years everyone will probably be saying what a great job it was. Production receipts tend to have that effect. Anyway, if Shell as one of the most experienced companies at executing mega-projects in harsh environments struggled more than usual on the Sakhalin II project, how exactly is Gazprom or Rosneft going to fare once they have a go? Neither company has previously undertaken a modern, technically challenging mega-project involving hundreds of subcontractors from dozens of countries, employing thousands upon thousands of people of a bewildering array of nationalities. I’m not sure either has even run a small project with one main foreign subcontractor. I’m not sure if they even have a procurement department which can prepare tender documents in English. I’m not even sure if they have a procurement department. You get my drift. So chances are, whatever calculations and estimations they have made, they are likely to increase significantly over the course of a project, especially if either company falls into the trap of allowing conflicts of interest to go unchallenged, such as the head of contracts and procurement awarding major packages of work to a subcontractor owned by none other than himself. These practices are rife across Russia, and it would be pretty optimistic to assume they won’t occur on oil and gas mega-projects run by nationalised companies.

Secondly, there is the question of who is actually going to carry out these projects, which companies and what people. It is no secret to anyone that there is a serious shortage of skilled people in the worldwide oil and gas industry at the moment, and the high oil price has rejuvinated dozens of expansion, modification, and upgrade projects as well as blown the dust off plenty of planned developments. Workers in an industry like this can afford to be fussy about which projects they join: the Sakhalin projects have lost hundreds of their Malaysian, Indonesian, and Philippino labour force as new projects come up either back in their home countries or in sunnier climes such as Australia. The Sakhalin projects have been competing heavily for skilled resources against the mega-projects in Qatar and elsewhere in the Middle East, usually without much success. For most people, Sakhalin and northern Russia is a place to go and gain some experience and save some money, and once you have a decent skillset, people tend to disappear somewhere more accommodating. Therefore, one of the hardest jobs Gazprom and Rosneft are going to have is attracting and retaining the skilled workers needed to man these projects, and to do that they are going to have to pay probably more than anywhere else. If this manpower premimum hasn’t been considered in the estimations of how much these development projects are going to cost then it should have, because for the next decade and possibly more the Russian projects are going to have to be primarily manned by foreigners.

The giant projects on Sakhalin have produced a good number of Russian workers who have, considering the few years they have been learning, developed astonishingly quickly, and will no doubt find themselves in prominent positions on future projects. But as a proportion of the available working population, which is small to being with given the country’s size and the work to be done, there numbers are way too low. It is a sad fact that in the experience of every company involved in the Sakhalin projects, if you take 10 Russians onto the job, 1 will be brilliant, 1 good, 1 average, and 7 utterly useless. We put several hundred through our training school on the island, of which a grand total of none are still with us. Admittedly we were taking on ex-soldiers and criminals from the labour departments (as we were compelled to do) and hence our recruitment pool was hopelessly poor, but the proportion of ordinary Russian men who fail to make the grade on an oil and gas project either through alcohol consumption, failure to turn up to work, or lack of self-motivation is shockingly high for a country looking to develop rapidly. Which is a shame, because as I said, there is a good core of Russians who within months became as capable and reliable as anybody else, who I know feel a bit let down by a lot of their compatriots. But even Russia cannot take these for granted, because the oil and gas industry is very much global, and if Russians can take a position on a foreign project for more money, chances are they will. So one of the enormous challenges facing Gazprom and Rosneft is how they will staff their projects, especially as they have made it increasingly difficult to bring foreigners to work in Russia, the costs for which will simply be passed on.

The other challenge they will have is to identify which companies will carry out the work, and more importantly, under what terms. As most individuals in the global oil and gas industry are fussy about which projects they can join, as are most companies. The American company Fluor, one of the largest and most experienced oil and gas project management and construction companies in the world, has an order backlog of $30bn. It is in no hurry to bid jobs low just so it can fill its order book and keep its staff employed. Technip in the Middle East a few years ago won so much work it struggled to execute it. Any company working in oil and gas that is struggling for work right now is going to be out of business altogether pretty soon. There is enough work, more than enough, for everybody. So if anybody is going to be bidding work on Russian mega-projects, they will already have seen the lessons of Sakhalin I and II, and be in no hurry to underprice them. The situation in which AgipKCO has found itself on the Kashagan project in Kazakhstan is telling:

Kashagan operator AgipKCO has set back the award of the last big first-stage contract for at least two innovative drilling barges by cancelling a long-standing tender for lump-sum offers and asking for prices based on man hours, writes Vahe Petrossian.

AgipKCO has told the two rival partnerships led by Technip and Keppel Fels, which submitted technical and commercial bids last year, that their prices are too high, a source said.

“They rejected the bids and are considering a reimbursable commercial package,” the source said.

The new requirement is based on estimates of the man hours required to complete the job, which could involve up to six of the cantilevered barges.

This would eliminate all or most of the risk factor priced in by the bidders placing the risk on the client instead. The risk factor is estimated at between one-fifth and one-quarter of the prices quoted so far by the bidders.

The value of the planned contract under a lump-sum arrangement had been estimated at more than $500 million.

Here we had two consortia (a third dropped out earlier) bidding a technically demanding scope which had never been attempted before, in a country where the government changes the laws whenever it feels like it. Unsurprisingly, the contingencies built in were collosal to the point that the operating company, AgipKCO, could not afford to award the job. So AgipKCO has now resorted to accepting reimbursable terms whereby the winning consortium gets paid for manhours and materials expended at agreed rates, instead of a lump sum for completing all works. If the job overruns, the operating company will have to keep paying for the work to continue, an approach which doesn’t give the engineering companies the same incentive to work efficiently. On the Sakhalin II project workscopes, laws, and other circumstances changed so much that Sakahlin Energy reluctantly agreed to accept a change to reimbursable terms for some subcontractors who had fallen way behind and were facing insolvency. Bearing all this in mind, it is certain that any engineering company bidding a mega-project in Russia, especially a ground-beaking Arctic offshore project, will include either an enormous contingency and a raft of conditions in its lump sum bid, or will refuse to accept anything other than reimbursable terms. Such is the uncertainty which faces companies who venture onto Russian oilfields that they will be treading very carefully indeed.

So what does all this mean? Have the Russians taken all these factors into account when coming up with their investment figures, confident that they can pull off without a hitch for 20 years what Shell have struggled with for the past 4? They did put a man into space, after all. Nobody knows, certainly not me. But this what I think. Consider for a moment that these figures of X-billion in developments and investments have been thrown about like confetti for the past few years, but as of yet nothing has really moved forwards, and if anything large steps have been taken backwards from actually preparing the ground for the years ahead. Who can honestly say that massive investment will be easier for the Russians to get in 2008 than it was in 2005? And do the large foreign companies essential for performance of the works have any greater confidence to trust those who will be managing them now than they might have had three years ago? So far, these numbers are all theoretical.
The world is heading for an economic slowdown, and Russia has a new president in charge. So much that was certain is now less so. The Shtokman project has just started, with the main players in place and the first early works subcontracted. All eyes will be on this one, eyes eager to see past the project and into the future of the Russian oil and gas industry. One of the keenest pair will belong to me, who is guessing that these multi-billion dollar figures are been bandied about without due consideration of what they actually entail.

So, as a follow up to this post, I can now confirm that I will indeed be making a return to Nizhnekamsk, scene of my first ever trip to Russia four years ago.  I leave Sakhalin on Monday, spend two days in Nizhnekamsk, then come back to Sakhalin via Moscow. 

The 24-hour journey each way aside, this should be a hoot.