The economic impact of Neptun Deep for Romania is around 42.4 billion euro, of which 22 billion euro could be the budgetary impact, Laurian Lungu, economist and co-founder of Consilium Policy Advisors Group, said on Friday.

“We did a very recent, one-week study, in which we evaluate the impact of this Neptun Deep, from an economic point of view for Romania, what it means as an economic impact, as an impact on budget revenues, as an impact on the workforce, for that it also has an impact there and, of course, on the current account deficit. The results are really very good. It is an investment that Romania needs. The economic impact of Neptun Deep is somewhere around 42.4 billion euro, I’m talking about the entire period in which this exploration takes place, namely 2027 – 2036 – and maybe we’ll add another year or two for what the so-called decommissioning means. It has a very big impact on the economy. At the income level budget is somewhere close to half of the economic impact. So we are talking about 22 billion euro, impact on the budget revenue. This is where the state’s participation comes in. Basically, the royalties come in, all these social security contributions that will come to the budget come in due to the fact that there are many jobs, jobs that are maintained or that are created. Then, the tax on profit, on income,” said Laurian Lungu, quoted by Agerpres.

“Romania will effectively double its production capacity. It will probably become, at least until 2030, the first gas producer in Europe, because at the moment it was the Netherlands. We all know that this field, Groningen, will close from 2024. Thus, when Romania starts extracting from Neptun Deep, Groningen will be closed and obviously the share of Romania’s gas production in the total gas production at the EU level will be very, very high. Currently the Union has somewhere a dependency rate of gas imports of 97%,” explained Laurian Lungu.