“One of the reasons we came in Romania is technological progress. When I started my career, you could not dig any deeper than 200 meters,” says Ian Fischer, chief executive of ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Romania Limited. He added that depths of over 3,000 meters are possible now. Costs are huge with risks to match, but we have to understand that the times of easy oil are gone, Fischer said.
ExxonMobil partnered with Petrom in 2008 in order to explore the Neptun block in the Black Sea and will split the profits equally. The two companies have now reached the stage where they are supposed to drill wells to check for deposits down there. The first such well in Romania will be drilled by the end of this year or early in 2012.
“Major investments are just beginning,” Fischer said.
Whereas the companies have invested several million dollars so far, the cost will be in the range of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars from now on.
To drill the first exploration well, ExxonMobil will bring a ship specially built for the Black Sea, which cost $1 billion, the Deepwater Champion. Drilling a well costs $1 million per day and takes about 100 days to complete, so that total cost is $100 million and the first well may turn up empty, Fischer said.
The ExxonMobil official explained that if the Black Sea turned out to be a successful experiment, the full development of the deposit could take as much as ten years.
Foreign oil and gas companies were not attracted only by the potential of the Black Sea to Romania, a country that has been probed by black gold seekers for well over 150 years. The new star fuel is the shale gas and Romania is said to have potential in this department, as well. Shale gas is just regular gas trapped into geological strata that are very difficult to reach and requires special technology to extract.
One of the oil companies looking for shale gas in Romania is Chevron, which will drill its first well next year.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)