Last Update: July 25, 2015

Dated November 19, 2013. Presented by the Romania Energy Center at the Romania Oil And Gas Conference, 2013.

The paper concerns itself with Romania’s energy security, and how the country’s future prospects are bleak unless they get on with fracking the shale gas, and drilling in Black Sea deep water locations.

In June 2013 the Southern Gas Corridor project took a negative turn. This project is supposed to bring natural gas from Central Asia, through a pipeline, to Europe. The long-term goal is “Energy Security” for Europe in a way that doesn’t leave Europe dependent on Russia’s natural gas supplies. This is a big problem hanging over Europe’s head, that natural gas supplies are low in Europe, and lots of European countries are heavily dependent on Russia’a natural gas. And, Russia being Russia, they will use their position of dominance to extract huge economic gains from Europe.

The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the plans to circumvent Russia’s natural gas dominance. Of course, it’s switching from a dependency on Russia’s natural gas to dependency on Central Asia natural gas. In any case the negative decision was to deny the “Nabucco West” project in favor of the “TAP” project. That dooms the Southern Gas Corridor to supplying just a small amount of natural gas, a large portion of which will go to Turkey.

The loss of the Nabucco project leaves Romania in a dire situation. They already are importing large quantities of oil and natural gas, and domestic production is declining at a 10% per year rate. It means Romania’s future is bleak, with heavy dependence on importing oil and gas from elsewhere. The country is already poor by economic measures, and importing oil and gas will just be a big drain on the economy.

Three prospective sources for future natural gas needs: Enhanced Recovery techniques, Fracking the shale deposits, Offshore drilling in the Black Sea. In a later slide the offshore resources are said to not be enough, that they’d better make further discoveries.

This is Romania’s prospects of external natural gas sources, if trying hard to avoid Russia. Much of this is LNG terminals slated to be built in Croatia and Poland. The Levantine basin is..well..

This is a major oil and gas discovery offshore in the Eastern Mediteranian. It was just discovered, and is years from being exploited. It could change the “energy” power structures in not just the Middle East, but for Europe.

Romania after Nabucco: Energy Security Options. At one time this was available for download via http://www.roec.ro/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ROEC_Presentation_OilGas2013-Radu-Dudau.pdf

About the Author(s)

David Herron : David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
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