Westside: Growing Production at War
After a 21-year career in the U.S. oil field in a variety of engineering, management and executive roles, Oleg Tolmachev joined Naftogaz to head its production operations in Ukraine in January of 2021. Naftogaz is a holding company with its subsidiary companies focused on E&P activity onshore and offshore, gas storage, oil and transportation, gas trading, as well as renewables.
In January 2023, Oleg Tolmachev became CEO of UGV, which is an upstream natural gas focused E&P in the Naftogaz family. UGV is producing approximately 1.5 BCFED, which is about 70% of the gas in the country and is the 3rd largest Ukrainian tax payer.
Despite the adversities of the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, Mr. Tolmachev led UGV to over 5% increase in production in 2023, breaking the trend of declining production since 2017. Besides the obvious challenges of the physical safety of employees as well as the company’s assets while operating on war time footing, inefficient organizational structure, lack of new technology, bureaucracy associated with state ownership, and corruption were all challenges that needed to be addressed in order to modernize the company and firmly set it on the production growth trend.
Location:
Core Laboratories Inc. Auditorium
6323 Windfern Road
Houston
,
TX 77040