Rompetrol invests 25m dollars

The petroleum group Rompetrol, run by businessman Dinu Patriciu, was granted concession to exploit natural gas in Golesti (Arges county), for which it announced an about 25 million dollar (some 20 million euro) investment programme for the next three years. “We have no plans to extract up to the last cubic metre of gas from this field,” stated Bogdan Popescu, vice-chairman of the Rompetrol Group, in charge of the exploration and production activities. “Our purpose is to build an underground warehouse for storing natural gases,” the company representative added. Through this decision, Rompetrol confirms the trend seen by all petroleum companies, to consolidate their upstream activities (exploration and production of petroleum and gas). The company is trying to build an integrated portfolio of petroleum and gas operations, given that petroleum supplies have seen a strong downward trend, and that Romania”s dependency on Russian imported gas might – under certain conditions, threaten the functioning of the economy. “We have been thinking about starting such a project ever since last summer, and the crisis seen this winter confirmed the need to put our intentions into practice,” explains Popescu. ZF