Upstream
Baltic Alliance continues to maintain a diverse portfolio of exploration and development opportunities, which enables the Corporation to be selective, maximizing shareholder value and mitigating political and technical risks. Our fundamental Upstream business strategies guide our global exploration, development, production, and gas and power marketing activities.
These strategies include identifying and selectively capturing the highest quality exploration opportunities, maximizing the profitability of existing oil and gas production, investing in projects that deliver superior returns, capitalizing on growing natural gas and power markets, and maximizing resource value through high-impact technologies.
These strategies are underpinned by a relentless focus on operational excellence, commitment to innovative technologies, development of our employees, and investment in the communities within which we operate.
As future development projects and drilling activities bring new production online, the Company expects a shift in the geographic mix of its production volumes between now and 2028. Oil and natural gas output from Kazakhstan is expected to increase over the next five years based on current capital activity plans.
Currently, this growth area accounts for 30 percent of the Company's production. By 2028, it is expected to generate about 35 percent of total volumes. The remainder of the Company's production is expected to include contributions from both established operations and new projects around the globe.
In addition to an evolving geographic mix, we expect there will also be continued change in the type of opportunities from which volumes are produced. Production from diverse resource types utilizing specialized technologies such as arctic technology, deepwater drilling and production systems, heavy oil and oil sands recovery processes, unconventional gas and oil production, and LNG is expected to grow from about 45 percent to around 50 percent of the Corporation’s output between now and 2016.
We do not anticipate the expected change in the geographic mix of production volumes and in the types of opportunities from which volumes will be produced. However, actual volumes will vary from year to year due to the timing of individual project start-ups and other capital activities, operational outages, reservoir performance, performance of enhanced oil recovery projects, regulatory changes, asset sales, weather events, price effects under production sharing contracts.
Enhanced oil recovery projects extract hydrocarbons from reservoirs in excess of that which may be produced through primary recovery, i.e., through pressure depletion or natural aquifer support. They include the injection of water, gases, or chemicals into a reservoir to produce hydrocarbons otherwise unobtainable.