No. 2, 2008

Geological prospecting works in Western Siberia began 75 years ago

At the beginning of January 1933, the popular journal Neft carried an article by Mikhail Charygin entitled “Why Look for Oil Beyond the Urals.” The article did not pass unnoticed by the research and engineering community of the USSR, and the first practical steps were taken to initiate the exploration of promising oil-bearing regions of Western Siberia in the 1930s-1940s.

Brilliant revelations and versions

The early history of geological exploration of Western Siberia receives, as a rule, but sketchy coverage in our special literature. That is unfair because the knowledge accumulated then about the geology of that unique land served as the point of departure for further exploratory effort.

The first general notions about it were voiced by Academician Johann Gmelin (1709-1755), a German naturalist, in his book My Travels in Siberia from 1733 to 1743. Later, the territory of Siberia was explored by an expedition of the Academy of Sciences led by Academician Pyotr Pallas in 1772-1774. Back in St. Petersburg, he prepared for publication the book Travels in Various Provinces of the Russian Empire, which saw the light in 1783-1788. It followed from the above-mentioned works that shallow Paleozoic and pre-Paleozoic formations occurred right below bogs, lakes, woods, steppeland soils, the taiga and the tundra.

In 1872, the Russian geologist Ivan Chersky (1845-1892) proved that, besides quaternary sediments, continental tertiary deposits (Oligocene, Neogene) are to be found in the stratigraphic section of the Western-Siberian lowland.

In 1890 and 1896, mining engineers Alexander Karpinsky (1846-1936) and Nikolay Vysotsky (1864-1932) discovered, near the eastern slope of the Urals, marine tertiary deposits (Eocene) confirmed in the early 20th century by research associates of the Russian Geological Committee, Alexander Krasnopolsky (1853-1929) and Alexey Borisyak (1872-1944).

In the early 20th century, Russian geologists explored marine and continental Jurassic and Cretacious deposits and detected the formations of all the departments of the quaternary system on the river Chulym and on the eastern slope of the Subpolar Urals.

Although scant, the material gathered at the turn of the 20th century indicated that the planet’s vastest lowland was also a major sedimentary basin. The cumulative thickness of all the deposits explored on marginal outcrops invariably exceeded 1,000 meters. Russian geologists were divided on the behavior of these deposits: some said they were gravitated to the center of the lowland, others insisted that they kept to the margins.

Nevertheless, the following historical fact is worthy of special note. On January 17, 1903, the Mining Department announced that Alexey Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and Public Property, had imposed, as of December 14, 1902, “a one-ruble tithe on geological prospecting works within the Tobolsk, Tomsk and Yenisey gubernias for 1903 on the strength of Article 562 of the 1893 Mining Code.”

On September 22, 1911, the Tobolsk Public Property Management Administration granted to the Ponamorenko & Co. partnership Permit No. 11591 for “geological prospecting works in the Yurty Tsingalinskiye region.” It authorized the partnership to prospect for oil over two years within the territorial limits it had applied for on July 30, 1911, “in the Tobolsk uyezd of the Narym volost, on Perevesnaya Griva adjoining the eastern side of Mt. Blizhny Chugas and located about 6 versts south-west of Tsingalinskiye Yurty.” Why was that very region selected for prospecting? What kind of company was that? What did its exploratory efforts come to? What was it that prevented the company from finding oil? Unfortunately, historians have no answers to these question for lack of any written evidence.

The right azimuth

It was only two decades later, however, that the time for real geological work came. On June 8, 1932, at the Urals-Kuzbass session of the USSR Academy of Sciences, “The mineral resource base of the Urals in the light of the latest surveys and explorations and the basic tasks connected with its study,” Academician Ivan Gubkin, the famous petroleum researcher (1872-1939), suggested geological prospecting works be started east of the Urals. “Oil will have a major role to play in building up a high-capacity fuel supply base,” he stressed. “We should raise the question of prospecting for oil on the eastern slope of the Urals.”

A few days afterwards, he reaffirmed his clear-cut position in an interview with a correspondent of the central Soviet newspaper Pravda: “I am positive,” he said, “it is high time we started systematic geological prospecting works on the eastern slopes of the Urals. Geological conditions suggest that they will not remain without results. I presume that on the eastern slope of the Urals the Jurassic coaly facies tending eastward – i.e. a little further away from the waterfront, where sediments have amassed and coal-bearing formations have deposited – that the coaly facies is being replaced by the oil facies.”

In January 1933, Academician Gubkin’s ideas about geological prospecting works in Western Siberia were further elaborated upon by the geologist Mikhail Charygin in his article “Why Look for Oil Beyond the Urals” which appeared in the popular Neft journal. “Oil fields may lurk in many parts of the vast territory of the Trans-Urals, Yakutia, Siberia and Far Eastern Territory,” he wrote. “Oil prospecting in those regions should certainly be intensified and organized in such a way as to enrich the eastern part of the USSR with new oil fields as early as in the second five-year-plan period.”

This position of leading Soviet geologists soon received support from the leadership of the USSR People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry and, late in the spring of 1933, Mikhail Charygin (1884-1969) led the first expedition of geologists of the Geological Prospecting Research Institute (GPRI) to the Trans-Urals. Later, Mikhail Charygin took out a Doctor’s degree in Geology and Mineralogy, became a Professor and a Merited Worker of Science and Technology of Russia. Georgy Ryabukhin (1908-1998), later Dr. Sc. (Geology and Mineralogy) and a Professor, was his reliable assistant. The very first months of fieldwork brought encouraging results, numerous oil seepages were explored, while the geological party led by N.A. Gedroits reported gas emissions outside the Ust-Port population center.

Presently, a strong reinforcement came in – a geological party of the Vostokneft Trust landed in Western Siberia. At the beginning of October 1933, Ivan Zlygostev, a member of the Uralseverput expedition of the Vostokneft Trust, was the first to start exploring oil seepages outside the village of Tsingaly (Filinsky Village Council, Samarovsky District, Ostyak-Vogul Region, now the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area). He reported his findings to Nikolay Smetsky, the head of the Uralseverput expedition, to the Ostyak-Vogul Regional Executive Committee and to the Vostokneft Trust in Sverdlovsk.

Geologist Vasilyev’s discovery

The Vostokneft Trust’s expedition led by the geologist Viktor Vasilyev (1910-1973), later Dr. Sc. (Geology and Mineralogy) and a USSR State Prize winner, achieved much more impressive results.

In Vasilyev’s service record, that period of his activities is described briefly but to the point: in 1934, he got down to geological exploration of the Western Siberian lowland with a view to providing scientific substantiation for the territory’s estimated oil- and gas-bearing capacity. Route geological survey was conducted along the rivers Tavda, Ishim, Irtysh (from Tobolsk to the estuary), Ob (from Surgut to Salekhard), Bolshoy Yugan, Kazym, Mias, etc. Vasilyev organized shallow drilling for Paleogene in the estuary of the river Irtysh. He was the first to hypothesize that the said formations were of exotic origin and confirmed the correctness of his theory by drilling results. Following his explorations, Paleogenic and Jurassic bedrock outcroppings in the above-mentioned points were removed from the geological map of the Western Siberian lowland. Besides, shallow drilling was conducted for the purpose of locating oil seepages in the river Belaya and in the basins of the Tavda and Bolshoy Yugan rivers. The findings of these investigations were made public in 1937. Later, the materials were generalized and published as a monograph in 1946.

Behind these terse lines there is a highly eventful and sometimes tragical epopee of the Vasilyev expedition’s work under incredibly hard conditions, in desolate places remote from roads and population centers, where austere nature and rigorous climate interfered with any planned geological investigations.

In 1939, Vasily Senyukov, Chief of the Main Geological Administration, submitted the report “On the organization of a large geophysical expedition to Western Siberia in 1939-1940” to the People’s Commissariat of the Fuel Industry on the basis of which the latter ruled to expand the scale of geological prospecting operations in Siberia. The motives for this decisions were disclosed in the article “Looking for Siberian Oil” by geologist Georgy Ryabukhin which appeared in the Pravda newspaper on October 14, 1939.

Viktor Vasilyev’s expedition was followed to Western Siberia by more geological parties, but on June 22, 1941, geological explorations in the region were interrupted by German troops’ treacherous assault on the USSR.

On the whole, it should be noted that the data gathered in the 1930s and the 1940s were sufficient for Russian scientists headed by Academician Dmitry Nalivkin to draw up, in 1947, on the government’s instructions, the first version of the program for a thorough oil exploration of the Western Siberian lowland. The program was beefed up by Order No. 108 of April 21, 1948 which obliged the Petroleum Geology Administration of the USSR Ministry of Geology “to promote oil and gas prospecting in Western Siberia and to render urgent assistance to the Central Western Siberian geological prospecting expedition in drilling key wells.” On June 17, 1948, new order – No. 375 – was issued instructing the USSR Ministry of Geology “to put the Western Siberian oil and natural gas prospecting expedition on a year-round schedule.” Specialists of that geological expedition by right came to be known as the trailblazers to the hydrocarbon treasures of Western Siberia thanks to whom Academician Ivan Gubkin’s prophetic previsions about Western Siberia’s enormous hydrocarbon potential have come true.

Today, the Khanty-Mansi Museum of Geology, Oil and Gas features a vast display devoted to Viktor Vasilyev’s expedition to Western Siberia which, using archive documents and paraphernalia of the past, tells a fascinating story about the Soviet geologists’ pioneering effort to disclose that region’s oil- and gas-bearing capacity.