Wintershall to Press Ahead on Shale Gas in Germany
Wintershall Holdings GMBH will continue to pursue opportunities for the development of shale gas in Germany.
"We plan geological investigations at two concessions in North-Rhine Westphalia to see if the potential is there," Wintershall chief executive Rainer Seele.
Wintershall, the oil and gas arm of German chemicals group BASF, received permission from the relevant mining authorities in August 2010 to conduct geological investigations in two license areas.
The Wintershall concessions “Rhineland” and “Ruhr” cover an area of 3,900 km² North-Rhine Westphalia, stretching from the German-Dutch border in the West to the Sauerland region in the East.
"Germany cannot not just rely on imports permanently," Seele said.
The Wintershall chief executive's comments come as Germany is considering tighter regulation of the hydraulic fracturing process used in shale gas extraction.
A recent report commissioned by the German Environment Ministry indicated that the govenment should ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, near drinking water reservoirs and mineral springs and require developers to conduct environmental impact studies.
“The study’s results and recommendations are a major step forward in the discussion about fracking,” Environment Minister Peter Altmaier said. “All concerns must be alleviated before fracking is used.”
However, fracking has been used in Germany including by Wintershall and Exxon Mobil, since 1955 in the Schleswig-Holstein region and since 1976 in the country’s Lower Saxony region.
The report indicated that at least 275 fracks linked to conventional gas and oil wells in Lower Saxony.
Speaking a to conference last November, Klaus Sontgerath, head of department, Lower Saxony State Authority for Mining, Energy and Geology, said “up until now, we do not know of any environmental incidents caused by fracking.”
Quoting Jorg Bode, Lower Saxony’s minister of Economic affairs, Sontgerath said: “There are no higher safety and environmental risks because of hydraulic fracturing,” and that “in Lower Saxony hydraulic fracturing was used 35 years ago for the first time and has been successful in more than 250 projects.
North Rhine-Westphalia in Western Germany awarded exploratory drilling licenses to ten companies, including ExxonMobil, which holds significant acreage representing almost 17,859 square km under license directly or conjunction with BEB Erdgas und Erdoel GmbH, a joint venture with Shell, Wintershall, California based BNK Petroleum and a consortium led by Thyssen Asset Management GmbH.
Subsequently, the state imposed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing pending the results of a review process presently underway at the federal level.
Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGS) has estimated the country's unconventional gas reserves at 0.7-2.3 trillion cubic metres.