Government hopes gas reserves will last 10 years
Environment and Energy Minister Kostas Skrekas said Friday that there is hope that hydrocarbon – oil and natural gas – reserves will be sufficient to cover Greece’s needs for a decade.
The first exploratory drilling for hydrocarbons in Greece in 22 years will take place onshore next year, on reserves first found by British Gas in 1999, north of the city of Ioannina, in the northwestern region of Epirus.
A 2D seismic survey was conducted in 2019.
Skrekas said on Friday that surveys showed a 15% probability, considered high in drilling terms, of a significant deposit. “The Ioannina deposit could cover the consumption of Greece, if confirmed by real data, for 10 years,” Skrekas told Skai TV.
Energean, currently the country’s sole oil producer, has exclusive rights to the area. It also operates Prinos, Greece’s only productive oil field, in the country’s north, under the Aegean Sea.
Energean will submit the environmental impact assessment study to the ministry by the end of the year. The speed of the state’s response will determine whether the drilling will, in fact, commence in 2023. The company remains hopeful, but understandably skeptical, given its experience with the smaller Katakolo field, off the western coast of the Peloponnese, where it has been waiting for its environmental impact assessment to be approved since December 9, 2019. That field has confirmed reserves of nearly 1 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 14 million barrels of oil.
While environmental campaigners are pushing for a shift to zero-carbon fuel, Greece is among the countries that say the disruption of Russian energy supplies as a result of the Ukraine war is reason to increase hydrocarbons exploration.
The government views gas as a transition fuel as it ramps up renewables and says the shift in its strategy, following the war in Ukraine, will not undermine its plan to boost green energy and cut carbon emissions by 55% by 2030 in line with European Union climate change targets.
[Kathimerini/Reuters]
