With a Little Help from My Friends
Life ain’t bad when one of the largest oil and gas companies has got your back.
Just ask Serbia’s NIS Gazprom Neft following Russian Gazprom’s acquisition of 51% of the company in 2009. These days NIS, established in 1949, is a vertically integrated energy company with foreign assets in places like Angola, Republika Srpska, Hungary and Romania.
What’s more, NIS is taking bold steps into unconventional gas, as told to delegates at the CEE Unconventional & Shale Gas Development Forum in Budapest, Hungary.
In her presentation, Snjezana Stankovic, Project Manager for Unconventionals at NIS Gazprom Neft, explained: “Gazprom made some changes in our company and we have a very interesting portfolio, which covers a refinery, and exploration and production also.
“It’s a strategic decision by Gazprom Neft to invest in this area in this company,” she said of unconventional gas.
Conference Chair Gabor Boda, Exploration Manager at Falcon/TMX Oil & Gas Hungary, offered his insights.
He commented, “Obviously, this major investment from Gazprom Neft was ultimately a huge boost in the life of NIS and quite frankly we consider these latest developments in the field of unconventional research and exploration in Serbia as extremely interesting as Gazprom has been reluctant in conducting unconventional research – so this is interesting to say the least.
“The expansion of NIS has been rather dynamic, some might even say aggressive, in the Balkan areas in the southeastern part of Europe. This is a highlight in terms of seeing new players in this part of the world. I’m positive it will play a critical role in exploration and production in this part of the world. There are interesting developments in Romania, Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in both the upstream and downstream sectors,” added Mr. Boda.
Bloomberg recently reported that NIS planned on spending $588 million this year in its search for hydrocarbons.
In her presentation, Ms. Stankovic showed NIS’ exploration licenses in Serbia.
She began her explanation of how NIS started to get involved in unconventional projects by outlining the necessary characteristics for productive tight and shale gas plays: organic richness, maturation, gas in place, brittleness, mineralogy, thickness, permeability and natural fractures.
“We need all of these for evaluation of an unconventional project and we are trying to recognize some of these elements in our part of the Pannonian basin,” she explained. “We want to adopt European lessons, systematic and comprehensive data acquisition, looking for oil and gas fields near already discovered fields.
“We are a small country,” Stankovic said of Serbia, “but we are privileged to have our own oil and gas fields – they are not so big, but they exist.”
She reported that NIS was taking into account hydrocarbon shows, pressure data, well logs and the fracture system, commenting: “We’re trying to monitor the latest technologies, development and processes.”
“The most important thing for us is for risk management to think unconventionally,” she explained. “And I suppose we have success in that, because our management decided to invest in an unconventional gas project in Serbia last year.”
Ms. Stankovic recalled, “We started with the fact that we have 15 mcm of gas in conventional gas deposits and according to existing data and simulations we found that we have three times more gas resources in tight formations around our existing fields.”
According to an estimate based on a model, she said Serbia could have 50 bcm of source rock potential within three license blocks in the region of Vojvodina.
NIS, she said, expected the following unconventional reservoir types in Serbia: tight gas, dry gas, wet gas, shale oil, oil and condensate, shale gas and coal bed methane.
Serbia, explained Ms. Stankovic, was able to meet about 15-20% of its natural gas needs through domestic sources.
“Maybe some new potential could decrease our imports,” she commented. “We hope so.”
Related Reading: Gazprom Eyes Development of Shale Gas Technologies