The National Agency for Mineral Resources (ANRM) aims to organize in the next period a new licensing round for onshore and offshore perimeters and wants to attract bids from big oil majors, said Thursday Gheorghe Dutu, the agency’s president, quoted by Agerpres newswire.
The ANRM wants to tender 36 new perimeters in the 11th round, out of which 28 are onshore and the rest in the Black Sea, including deep sea areas. Dutu said this is where the “big candidates” are expected.
“We will have to contribute to the restoration of Romania’s stock of energy resources by attracting investments in a predictable and coherent framework. The last discoveries in the Black Sea could see Romania become a gas exporter starting 2019-2020,” Dutu told Agerpres.
Dutu said earlier this month that an inter-government committee is working on new legislation for the petroleum sector, which could include differentiated royalties for projects.
He has hinted that the new scheme will take into account the maturity of the fields and their location. In addition, shale gas could
US oil major Chevron has started to seek shale gas in eastern Romania, while US-based ExxonMobil and Austrian OMV Petrom are jointly exploring a deep shore deposit off the coast of Romania. The companies announced they had made their first discovery of a deposit, which could contain an estimated 42 to 84 billion cubic meters of gas.
Ovidiu Posirca