Romania must act quickly to ensure its energy independence, says Cristina Prună, USR deputy and vice-president of the Commission for Industries and Services in the Chamber of Deputies. She proposes the urgent auctioning of new onshore and offshore perimeters, the simplification of the bureaucratic process of transferring deposits and the encouragement of liquefied natural gas production in Romania, according to a post on the official social page.
“With a war on the border, we need to act urgently and systematically on all fronts to achieve security of energy supply. The good news is that there are solutions to increase the production of crude oil and natural gas in Romania in the medium term. Simple measures to reduce our dependence on Russian gas. The first urgent measure is the auctioning of new onshore and offshore oil and gas perimeters for exploration, development and exploitation,” says Cristina Prună.
She believes that the National Agency for Mineral Resources (ANRM) is an opaque, politicized and inefficient institution, as no new perimeters for the exploration, development and exploitation of oil and gas fields have been put up for auction since 2010.
“In July 2019, ANRM publicly announced the concession of the oil exploration, development and exploitation operations of 22 onshore perimeters and 6 offshore perimeters, the so-called 11th round. This announcement was to be published in the Official Journal of the European Union, but things stalled at some point in the process. We do not have serious clarifications until today and no visibility on what will happen,” said Prună.
A second extremely useful measure that can lead to increased production is the simplification of the bureaucratic process of transferring from one economic operator to another of some deposits in operation.
In most cases, the transfer of oil and gas fields in operation from one operator to another takes more than 1 year. ”Like anything that passes through the filter of the Romanian state, it is delayed! How can this increase oil and gas production?”
The deposits subject to these transfers are maturing and require significant investment to continue to be economically viable. A smaller operator, who assumes such an investment, has every interest in recovering his money as soon as possible and thus would contribute to increasing production.
“The third measure is to encourage the production of liquefied natural gas in Romania. There are wells that can extract natural gas but are not connected to the Transgaz network. The cost of developing new gas pipelines is extremely high. The state should encourage investors to develop local liquefaction units for these natural gas to be transported to locations where they can be used,” said Cristina Pruna.
“Through such measures, Romania can get out of the dependence on medium-term imports and we have the chance to develop the local industry.”
