Ukraine has rolled out plans to organise further tenders for oil and gas blocks in 2020 and streamline access to geological data as it seeks to ramp up production and attract more investors, ICIS understands.

Roman Opimakh, the recently appointed head of the State Service of Geology and Subsoil of Ukraine, told ICIS the national upstream regulator was planning to organise licensing rounds with an acreage covering over 15,000sq km for onshore and offshore oil and gas blocks in 2020.

The auctions will be for concessions and production sharing agreements (PSAs).

Opimakh, who will be in London for an EBRD-backed roadshow on 11 December, said the regulator was planning to attract, among others, companies from the US, Canada or China.

He said there were also plans to develop a virtual centralised catalogue of information on geological data.

Starting from December, state-owned geological information, which is located in the regulator’s data room has been available free of charge for review by potential investors. So far the data room covers geoscience information about three PSA tenders, which will take place in February 2020.

Ukraine has one of Europe’s largest oil and gas reserves, with conventional reserves alone estimated at 905 billion cubic metres. It is also thought to have close to 5 trillion cubic metres of shale gas and tight gas reserves, but most has been largely under-explored because the country had been dependent on Russian imports.

However, since the Euro-Maidan revolution of 2014, it took robust steps to reform its gas market, stopped Russian imports in 2015 and is now determined to increase production from 20.5bcm in 2018 to 35 billion cubic metres/year by 2030, of which 5bcm/year could be exported by that date.

In the upstream sector it brought more transparency by organising auctions on the ProZorro platform and opened up geological data, which had been hitherto confidential.