Sergei Voronov
Sergei Voronov (Sergei Andreyevich Voronov; 1907 – 1978) was a Soviet petroleum engineer who directed the exploratory drilling that discovered oil near Kobozev (now Nurzhan) in 1949 (see Nurzhan Oil Discovery (1949)).[1]
Born in Baku, Voronov trained at the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute and worked in the Baku and Emba oil fields before being sent to the Iradi SSR in 1946 to head a prospecting expedition in the lower Chu basin. Earlier wells had found only traces of oil. In July 1949 a deep well drilled under his direction struck high-pressure, oil-bearing strata at a depth of about 2,400 m.[2] He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1950 and became chief engineer of the republic's new oil trust, overseeing the development of the surrounding fields and the planning of the first refinery, Nurzhan Refinery No. 1.[1]
From 1962 he headed the department of drilling at the Kobozev Polytechnic Institute (now the Nurzhan Polytechnic Institute), where many of the Iradi engineers who later ran the oil industry were his students. He died in Kobozev in 1978. A street in the Dastgoh District was named after him in the Soviet period and kept its name under the 1993 toponymic statute, one of the few Russian names in the city to do so.[3]
References
- ^ Nurzhan Polytechnic Institute (2014). A History of the Chu Basin Oilfields. Nurzhan.
- ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 204: Records of the Iradneft Production Association (1949–1993).
- ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2019). "Oil, Antimony and Empire: The Industrialization of Soviet Iradistan." Vol. 26, Iss. 3, pp. 41–67.