Leonid Fedun, OAO LUKOIL Vice President, presented the outlook of major trends in global oil & gas markets to 2025 compiled by the Company’s specialists to the oil gas market community in

Analysis of the current problems of Russia’s oil and gas industry in the context of the main trends of global oil and gas markets’ development is an especially important part of this outlook.

Key conclusions of this outlook:

-         Global demand for oil will continue to grow. Growth of population and consumer class in Asia will support oil demand increase. The main increase in consumption will come from transportation sectors in developing countries.

-         Increase of oil production in North America won’t lead to a global oil prices collapse. Modern methods for evaluation of shale oil reserves allow considerable uncertainty therefore we are cautious in our estimates of the US production potential. A number of factors that include the growing cost of reserve replacement, the balancing role of OPEC and depreciation of US dollar will help to support the current levels of oil prices in mid-term.

-         The European oil refining industry is experiencing a systemic crisis. Such ongoing trends as the decrease in US gasoline imports and commissioning of new highly effective oil refineries in the Middle East and Asia will continue to have a long- term negative effect on European producers.

-         Gas consumption will grow faster than oil consumption. The greatest potential for gas consumption growth is in China, while the European markets - Russia’s traditional clients - will continue remain stagnant.

-         Maintaining oil production in Russia requires large-scale use of new technologies. The currently planned projects are unable to compensate production decline on brownfields. Without large-scale use of new technologies, oil production in Russia will begin to fall in 2016-2017.

-         The Russian oil refining industry will undergo significant modernization but risks of gasoline deficits remain. Measures taken by the Russian government will promote conversion rate of domestic oil refineries but the situation on the automotive gasoline market will remain quite tense until 2016-2017.

-         Main challenge for Russian gas industry is the access to the new markets. Competition on the global gas markets will continue to rise. To develop gas production in Russia, Russian companies have to gain access to growing markets.