Maintaining the current level of oil and gas production in Romania requires annual investments of one billion euros, given the fact that the production suffers a natural decline of 10%, according to the desprepetrol.ro portal, launched by the Romanian Association of Petroleum Exploration and Production Companies (ROPEPCA).

According to the portal, Romania has almost a third of all employees in oil and gas extraction in the EU, 25,600 respectively, of the total of 77 900, quotes Agerpres.

“The production suffers from a natural decline of 10%. The degree of depletion of the current reserves is 87%. Investments of 1 billion euros / year are necessary, in order to maintain the production at the same level. Without investments, Romania’s production of oil will run out in 12 years, and natural gas production in 9 years,” mention the authors of the website.

Romania has 13,000 active wells, well above the UK, which has 2,300 wells, Denmark – 1500, Italy – 900 or Norway – 400. However, the output per well in our country is the smallest of these countries, the 21 barrels per day compared to the 2,350 barrels per day in Norway, or 964 in Denmark, 363 in Great Britain and 271 in Italy.

“The taxation of the oil companies in Romania is performed through the usual taxes (income tax, social contributions and other usual duties), plus the specific tax. The permanent specific taxation is composed of royalties, the construction tax and the tax on oil sales – in total an extra of 9.5% of the total revenues oil companies,” also indicate the data from the oil companies.

However, in 2013, other temporary taxes have been added, such as the tax on the pole and the tax from the additional revenue from liberalization, which raised the level of taxation in the oil sector at 15% of the revenues.

The European average (excluding the giant deposit from Groeningen in the Netherlands) is 9.3% – comparable to the permanent specific taxation in Romania, say the oil workers. But if we add the temporary taxes in force, in Romania the average is double that of the EU countries with comparable production per well, where there is a specific tax of 7.5% on average.

The ROPEPCA representatives also showed that one billion euros invested in oil and gas sector creates or maintains 45,900 jobs, bringing the state budget one billion euros in taxes and has an impact upon the GDP of 3.2 billion euros.

ROPEPCA was founded in 2012 and accounts 19 members, companies that last year performed total investments of 1.03 billion euros, equivalent to 6.5% of total investments in Romania. The contributions to the budget amounted to 2.4 billion euros, representing 10% of the total state budget.