One of the priority areas of Zarubezhneft's work is the search for marginal projects in the Andean subregion of Latin America (in particular Ecuador), as well as the Arab Republic of Egypt, and the correct assessment of capital investments in the construction of onshore infrastructure at the stage of project evaluation. According to a study by Independent Project Analysis, just over a fifth of large projects in the oil and gas industry can be called successful in terms of meeting the stated cost and time constraints. The expediency of obtaining the necessary and sufficient information about the pricing policy, applied approaches to pricing, state and regional prices, the cost of material and technical resources and other aspects before making a decision to enter a particular region is noted.
The article discusses the results of a comparative analysis of the cost of services and facilities in Ecuador and Egypt based on the following information: 1) data from actually implemented construction contracts in the region in 2018–2020; 2) data from the IHS Markit database; 3) information on the composition of typical facilities of the design institute of Zarubezhneft; 4) analysis of differences in aggregated pricing methods in Russia, Ecuador, Egypt and IHS Markit (the differences are reduced to a single indicator for determining the cost). Comparison of the results of calculating the cost of various types of objects based on the IHS Markit database with the actual prices in the region showed both an increase and a decrease in cost. It has been established that in order to bring the received value of the objects to the prices of Ecuador, it is necessary to use the cost adaptation coefficients in IHS Markit: for objects containing technological equipment, the estimated reduction coefficient is 0.8; for objects with prevailing costs of construction and installation work, the estimated multiplying factor is 1.6. For the conditions of Egypt, the comparison showed that for linear and treatment facilities the cost, provided in the estimates of Zarubezhneft, exceeds the actual figures by 11-21%. The main reason for this is higher labor costs, while the cost of material and technical resources corresponds to the price level of Egypt. It was noted that the development of projects requires preliminary information from local sources on the actual prices.
