Exxon Reaches Arctic Oil Deal With Russians

The agreement seemed to supersede a similar but failed deal that Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft, reached with the British oil giant BP this year — with a few striking differences.

Where BP had planned to swap stock, Exxon, which is based in Texas, agreed to give Rosneft assets elsewhere in the world, including some that Exxon owns in the deepwater zones of the Gulf of Mexico and on land in Texas.

In announcing the arrangement at a surprise signing in the Russian resort town of Sochi, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin described a sweeping global alliance — and a potentially vast investment by Exxon in the Russian Arctic.

“The scale of the investment is very large,” Mr. Putin said. “It’s scary to utter such huge figures.”

But while Russian news agencies said Mr. Putin had stated the potential investments by both companies to be as high as $500 billion, Exxon officials said the figures, at least initially, would more likely be in the tens of billions of dollars.

For Exxon, which is America’s largest company and is a spinoff of the original Standard Oil, the deal means wading deeper into Russia’s risky business environment. As a result of the agreement, which is almost certain to require a review in Washington, more of the company’s investments and future earnings will partly hinge on policies set in the Kremlin.

Russia has reneged on deals with Western oil companies before. In 2006, for example, it compelled Royal Dutch Shell to sell 50 percent of a Sakhalin offshore development to Gazprom, a state company — after Shell spent a decade and more than $20 billion of its own money and that of other investors to build the project’s infrastructure.

Until now, Exxon’s principal investment in Russia has been a production sharing agreement on Sakhalin Island, on Russia’s eastern coast. That arrangement, which waives local taxes and provides the Russian government a share of the oil produced, is regarded as less risky than the deal made Tuesday.

Under the new agreement, the state-owned Rosneft could become a part-owner of drilling operations in the United States. Those operations could include two of the industry’s most contentious oil extraction methods — drilling for oil in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and using the so-called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technique on land. The Russians want to learn about both types of drilling for use at home.

The Rosneft deal would also be among the most significant attempts by a company from a country that is not an American ally to acquire United States oil fields since Cnooc, the large Chinese oil company, tried to buy the California oil company Unocal. Although it was not formally banned, that deal fell apart in 2005 after members of Congress criticized the potential Chinese ownership of American oil assets.

Having an American company win the Rosneft deal could also suggest that the Obama administration’s policy of détente toward Russia, known as the reset, can benefit United States businesses, said Cliff Kupchan, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group, a consultancy.

The Exxon-Rosneft deal, if completed, would further a long-held goal of the Russian petroleum industry to diversify internationally. It would allow Russia to do that by using access to reserves at home to gain the necessary capital and technological expertise.

Russia’s economy is dependent on petroleum for about 60 percent of its export revenue. Policies here are also important for world oil supplies, as Russia now pumps more oil than Saudi Arabia. Yet Russia’s onshore fields in Siberia are in decline, threatening the prosperity and geopolitical clout that has come with oil wealth in the last decade.

Despite the varying accounts of the overall potential value of the agreement, a fact sheet released by the companies indicated an initial commitment to invest $3.2 billion in exploration in the Kara Sea, the body of water between the northern coast of European Russia and the Novaya Zemlya island chain.

Once seen as a useless, ice-clogged backwater, the Kara Sea now has the attention of oil companies. That is partly because the sea ice is apparently receding — possibly a result of global warming — which would ease exploration and drilling.