Moscow - Just a few years after compelling foreign oil companies to renegotiate their contracts in Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin has invited executives from some of the largest such companies to discuss new work on Siberian natural gas fields.
Executives from Shell, Exxon Mobil, Total and other companies met with Mr. Putin in Salekhard, a city in the Yamal-Nenets district that is rich in large deposits of untapped natural gas.
Mr. Putin said he called the meeting to discuss strategies to develop the Yamal Peninsula, a treeless realm jutting into the Arctic Ocean that is so dense in gas fields it is sometimes called the Saudi Arabia of gas.
Mr. Putin did not make any specific offers to the gathered energy executives but said instead that he wanted to open a dialogue about the region's future.
"We are ready for broad partnership and that is why we invited you here," Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript posted on the government Web site. "We want you to feel like members of our team, participants in this process."
Mr. Putin's softening tone on energy deals with Western oil companies inside Russia mirrors a long-term trend in the petroleum business. Oil-rich countries often seek to renegotiate when prices rise and become more conciliatory as they fall and industries need capital and expertise to maintain output.
Oil prices are now about the same level they were in 2006 and 2007 when the Russian government compelled renegotiations. However, the steep - if brief - drop to below $40 a barrel, close to the break-even production costs of some fields in Russia, dispelled the belief that oil prices, which have rebounded to the $70 range, might remain elevated indefinitely. Mr. Putin said "transparency" and "stability" would be the principles of new contracts.
Three years ago, while the renegotiations were under way, Russian officials had suggested that national companies would develop most onshore fields from then on.
Gazprom, the natural gas monopoly, had announced an ambitious plan to develop the Yamal Peninsula, only to scale it back during the global recession as financing dried up and gas demand slumped.
Alex Fak, an oil and gas analyst at Troika Dialog in Moscow, said the meeting was expected as Russian state oil and gas companies had been indicating for months that they would seek to work with foreign partners to develop the fields on Yamal Peninsula. "The upstream development could go much more smoothly with foreign participation," he said.
Energy executives were cautiously optimistic. Neil Duffin, the president of development at Exxon Mobil, said the company wanted to work on Yamal. "This is our hope," he was quoted as saying in news reports from Salekhard confirmed by Exxon.
Still, the Russian ministers of economy and natural resources suggested at the meeting that they would strike a hard bargain. They said deals would be structured so that the foreign firms that received access to the reserves would transfer technology to Russia's oil industry by placing orders with Russian factories, localizing production and hiring Russian engineers to work on the development.
Andrew E. Kramer