The Carpathian Thrust Fold Belt
The Carpathians started the modern oil and gas industry, with first drilling in Poland in 1854 and Romania in 1857.
As of today, the Carpathians is the sixth largest hydrocarbon bearing thrust belt in the world behind those in the Middle East, Mexico and the Caspian.
Discovered reserves from the Carpathians to date total 14 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Published sources give a total of 2.6 billion barrels of oil equivalent “yet to be found”.
One of the key attractions of the region is the high impact nature of the prospects – relatively low cost of drilling with significant value potential. Aurelian considers the Carpathian thrust belt analogous to Llanos in Columbia where the application of 2D seismic led to significant discoveries.
The Carpathian Thrust Fold Belt in southern Poland, Slovakia and central Romania
The Carpathians are a range of mountains forming an arc roughly 1,000 miles long from the Czech Republic in the northwest through Slovakia, Poland, Hungary,
Ukraine and Romania in the east, to the Iron Gates on the Danube River between Romania and Serbia in the south.
The old fields are almost entirely very shallow, discovered from surface geology and the presence of seeps. The deeper section is largely unevaluated because of the extremely limited amount of seismic acquired to date. Given new seismic, and the processing and interpretation technology developed in other more explored thrust belts (e.g. Columbia Llanos) significant discoveries can be expected at greater depths of say, 2,000 – 6,000 metres.
As a result of the long history of oil and gas activity in the region there is a good infrastructure of pipelines and a strong service industry.
With GDP increasing substantially over recent years, the demand for oil and gas has increased accordingly. The supply however has been almost exclusively from the former Soviet Union. Security of supply is increasingly being recognised as extremely important, and any increase in indigenous production is encouraged.
Accordingly, the fiscal terms in Central Europe are very favourable to the producer. Drilling costs are modest, and chances of geological success are estimated to be approximately 16% on our licences.
We will be drilling four high-impact wells in this very promising area over the next two years.
