OMV Petrom wants to continue the Neptun Deep project, but legislative changes are needed to ensure stability, fiscal competitiveness and the right to a free gas market, OMV Petrom CEO Christina Verchere said on Wednesday.
“Regarding Neptune Deep, we want to go further and it is a discovered and valued resource. The sphere of development has been agreed and we are now trying to understand the fiscal and legislative part. Legislative changes are needed to ensure stability, competitiveness and the right to a free gas market, we’ve talked about these things before and they haven’t changed, but now there’s a sense of urgency.
Before Covid the context has changed, but now it’s changing even more, for that there are key issues related to the competitiveness of the gas market in Europe and the possibility of attracting money and investment in a difficult global context. This means that we must move quickly. Time is not on our side. I encourage the Romanian authorities to make progress in this sense,” said Christina Verchere, according to Agerpres.
The head of OMV Petrom considers that the oil and gas industry can be a significant contributor to the country’s economic engine, especially in the medium and long term.
“This is the nature of our sector: we have very large investments, which contribute to the economic recovery. There are three areas: we need to return to the liberalized gas market, which is planned for this summer. We have been in dialogue and we have supported this program, so as to improve the liquidity of the gas market. At the same time, we want to have a mechanism to support vulnerable consumers. Secondly, we are talking about additional taxation. Based on studies, we have shown that the Romanian tax system is not competitive in terms of Investments in the gas sector: Romania has three times the level of ‘onshore’ and five times higher in ‘offshore’ than the rest of Europe, and the situation needs to improve. This has always been a challenge in the oil and gas industry. And the offshore law. We have a huge opportunity with Neptune Deep and the Black Sea, it’s about private investment, not about money from the public sector and, therefore, the Romanian authorities must put this topic on the agenda in order to go further,” Christina Verchere stressed.