Dan Dragan, Secretary of State in the Ministry of Energy, says that there are important companies that want to enter the offshore gas extraction market in Romania.

“The Ministry of Economy has announced that it is preparing an amendment to the offshore legislation, which it intends to put in public debate and send to the new Parliament as soon as possible. The aim is to remove barriers and unblock important investments in the Black Sea platform. In this regard, we have already taken important steps with the new gas release program, which has increased the obligation to sell half of offshore production in the central markets. We also see important companies that are interested in entering these offshore gas operations,” Dragan told at the conference “Romanian International Gas Conference(RIGC)”, organized by the Energy Policy Group (EPG).
This comes in the context in which, a year ago, ExxonMobil, which owns half of the deep Neptun Deep perimeter (with gas reserves estimated at 42-84 billion cubic meters), announced that it wants to withdraw from Romania.

Initially, among those interested in taking over Exxon’s participation were the Poles from PGNiG, but they also recently announced that they were giving up this intention. In this context, the Minister of Energy, Virgil Popescu, stated in October that Romgaz wants to take over the Exxon package.

In turn, the Russians from Lukoil also want to withdraw from the Trident project, which they explored in partnership with Romgaz, although there were found reserves estimated at 30 billion cubic meters.

For comparison, Romania currently produces 10-11 billion cubic meters of gas per year.