Another contender for the contract was Romanian company Grup Servicii Petroliere (GSP), owned by businessman Gabriel Comanescu, whose bid was turned down.
Comanescu announced in March that GSP was bidding for the ExxonMobil drilling contract. However, the announcement on the electronic public procurement system website e-licitatie.ro says the US company only got one bid.
“We submitted a bid in the Exxon tender but were disqualified,” Radu Petrescu, communication manager of GSP told ZF, adding he could not say why that was. All GSP’s offshore rigs are currently booked for projects in the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea, he added.
This is the most valuable contract ever awarded by ExxonMobil in Romania. The group awarded $600 million worth of contracts for equipment and services to support its deep sea drilling in June alone, according e-licitatie.ro. The contracts went to large foreign companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton, while Romanian companies did not get any of them.
The government and the officials of OMV (majority shareholder of Petrom, Romania’s largest company) have repeatedly said the discovery of the huge gas deposit in the Black Sea Neptun block will give a boost to local businesses but the money is going to the US for now.
Moreover, Romania is one of the few countries in this world that put drilling of its oil and gas reserves in the hands of foreign companies, settling for very low royalties instead. Norway, Mexico, Brazil and other countries with oil and gas reserves do the drilling themselves and buy the technology they need.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)