Larysa Batura comes from Izium in the Kharkiv region. She grew up there, finished school there, and it was there that she first gave thought to her future profession. Her parents worked for the Izium oil and gas exploration expedition, so when the time came to choose a path, she decided to try her hand in the same field.

In 1983 she enrolled at the Ivano-Frankivsk Institute of Oil and Gas, taking a course in the geology and development of oil and gas fields. After graduating she was assigned to Romny in the Sumy region. That is where her career with the Company began.

In 1993 Larysa moved with her family to Okhtyrka. She started as a second-category geologist, then moved up to the first category. For more than three decades since, her work has centred on monitoring how oil and gas wells perform.

Production geology, she says, means working with large volumes of data every day. When parameters shift — water cut rises, say, or a productive horizon becomes depleted — geologists analyse the situation together with other specialists and work out how to optimise the well's further operation. Getting this right matters both for steady production and for an accurate picture of the real condition of the well stock.

Over the years Larysa has watched the profession change alongside the technology. Work that once required gathering information directly in the field can now be monitored remotely, at least in part. Automated systems make it possible to see well operating parameters, pressure, temperature and changes in readings in real time, and to respond to deviations more quickly.

“We analyse the data from these systems every day. We can see how a well is performing and how its parameters are changing, and we can help the process engineers work out whether its operation needs adjusting,” Larysa says.

She speaks separately about the team. In recent years a good many young specialists have joined the division, bringing new knowledge, ideas and an appetite for changing how things are done. “They have a lot of energy. They want to improve things, they put forward their own solutions. They are a real pleasure to work with,” she says.

Away from work, one of her greatest passions is books. Larysa's home library runs to some 15,000 volumes. A separate room with purpose-built bookcases was even set aside for them. Her love of reading began in her youth. She first took to Agatha Christie’s detective novels, and later discovered Ukrainian literature — Mykola Zarudnyi among others. Over the years she bought books herself, brought them back from trips and received them as gifts from friends, and so the large home library gradually came together.

Another of her pursuits is embroidery. Larysa makes pictures and smaller pieces, tends her garden, and for the past few years has been helping her husband with the vineyard. They grow dessert grape varieties, some of which keep almost until the New Year.