Environmental Protection

Rosneft strictly complies with the Russian environmental legislation and pursues a comprehensive environmental protection strategy, which provides for extensive involvement of the Company’s entire staff in reducing industrial and environmental risks. Seeking to minimize negative effects of its operation on the environment and employees’ health, Rosneft is focused on adopting innovative technology, continuously optimizing resource use, and decreasing industrial waste.

Along with conventional environmental protection measures, such as responsible water use, control over air pollution, land decontamination and reclamation, and replacement of damaged and obsolete equipment, Rosneft extensively employs cutting-edge techniques. For example, waste disposal is carried out only at specialized storage sites (landfills), whereas well pads significantly benefit from pioneering drainage systems. Rosneft also makes use of drilling solutions that do not require water storage pits and have their own treatment facilities (pitless drilling). In addition, observation wells are drilled around well pads. Another key element of Rosneft’s environmental protection policy is a unique system for pipeline operation monitoring. In its environmental and reclamation activities, the Company closely collaborates with specialized companies that use top-of-the-line technology and equipment.

Environmental protection is central to each stage of Rosneft’s projects, from design and engineering to commercial launch. Thus, in designing a pipeline infrastructure at the massive Vankor field in East Siberia, Rosneft’s specialists took into account such factors as migration patterns of deer and other wildlife. Where migration routes could potentially interfere with pipelines, the latter were designed to run overhead.

In 2010, the Company was carrying out full-scale environmental protection measures that included ecological evaluation and planning, geoecological research, contaminant source analysis, and obtaining environmental permits. Rosneft was also actively involved in replacing and upgrading oil spill recovery and other equipment, utilizing and recycling oil sludge, as well as constructing new treatment and reclamation facilities.

The Company’s operating expenditures on environmental protection in 2010 were RUB 6.8 bln, investment was RUB 6.5 bln.