Greece is black gold

[Angelo]

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[Prokomenos]

Poly petrelio gia mia mikri xwra san tin Ellada.

[Napalm]

I just hope no historic artifacts are destroyed when the greedy oil corporations begin to pillage the land.

Also, even the area north of Greece has plenty of resources. I heard one of the reasons that the anti-greek anti-serb jewish billionaire Soros supports albanina occupation of kosovo is that he owns large properties with coal underneath.

[Fatsa]

Wow, I never heard of Greece having oil. When did they discover this and how much oil does Greece exactly have? My Greek is a little rusty, so I'll let you guys explain it to me instead of me reading the above newspaper article.

[Apollyon]

The black liquid, petrol, is known to our ancestors at least 2000 years ago. That happened because there was a natural oil spring on the western Hellas ( on an island of the Eptanisa complex)

[Fatsa]

Alright, someone needs to explain this to me because I've done some google searches and can't find anything about Greece having oil. I found just the opposite, that Greece lacks natural resources. So what exactly is that article all about?

[half greek]

Originally Posted by Fatsa
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Alright, someone needs to explain this to me because I've done some google searches and can't find anything about Greece having oil. I found just the opposite, that Greece lacks natural resources. So what exactly is that article all about?

Heres an article in English Fatsa.

A new field rekindles Kavala Oil


Reserves of 227 million barrels east of Thassos are the biggest new oildiscovery in Greek territorial waters since the Prinos oilfield in the 1970s.They could help cut Greece's dangerously high dependence on Mideastern oil

COSTIS STAMBOLIS

Prinos was once Greece's only oil resource. General Federation of Labour president Christos Polyzogopoulos (C) and colleagues on a visit to the area's facilities

RENEWED interest in oil exploration in the north Aegean Sea has been expressed by local and international firms following the announcement in mid-January of what appears to be a major oil find in the sea area three nautical miles west of the island of Thassos.

The concession area where the find is located is explored by Kavala Oil SA, until few months ago a small company, which inherited the production facility at Prinos, which for many years, between 1981 and 1998, was Greece's only indigenous oil resource.

Greece relies heavily for its energy needs on imported oil and gas, which correspond roughly to 69 percent of its gross energy consumption. Dependence on imported oil and gas has been growing steadily over the last 25 years and is set to increase to 75 percent of total energy needs over the next 10 years, according to a recent study by Greece's energy regulator, RAE. Energy analysts, backed by an EU study, point out that this is a dangerously high figure.

Of the 320,000 barrels of oil a day (bpd) Greece consumes, only 4,000 to 5,000 are produced locally. All of these are pumped out of the Prinos oil field. The rest is imported by the two major refinery groups, Hellenic Petroleum SA and Motoroil SA.

Greece spends some $3.5-4.0 billion per year for these oil imports based on current prices, a pretty high figure when seen in the light of the current account deficit, which in 2003 was 11.8 billion euros, and the country's GDP which last year reached 154 billion euros.

The struggle for self-sufficiency

Back in the early 1980s Greece had been producing 25,000 to 28,000 bpd from the Prinos field. At that time, local oil production had managed to cover almost 13 percent of the country's petroleum needs.

In the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, Greece, like many other countries at the time, embarked on a systematic effort to discover and exploit its local energy resources. Strong incentives were given to international oil firms to carry out hydrocarbon prospecting in different parts of the country. It was then that US oil company Oceanic made its first successful offshore oil strike in the Prinos location a few miles southeast of Thassos.
A second strike followed further south in an area hence known as South Kavala, where substantial gas reserves were found.

An international consortium, the North Aegean Oil Company (NAPC), was then formed by Canadian firm Denisson Mines which undertook to explore the hydrocarbons commercially. Following an investment of about $600 million which covered a complex of platforms, underwater pipelines and onshore chemicals facilities, crude production commenced in early 1981 with 8,000 to 10,000 bpd. It peaked at more than 30,000 bpd by 1989. Production then started to drop as the main oil deposit gradually became depleted.

With production falling as low as 6,000 to 7,000 bpd and without being able to explore for new deposits, NAPC decided to leave Greece in 1998. Apart from low production, there were two main reasons:

-The price of oil in the international markets had dropped to some 12 dollars per barrel, which prevented the company from funding any major exploration programme within its primary concession area without help from its partner at the time, the state-owned Public Oil Corporation.

-The socialist government of Andreas Papandreou had barred NAPC from carrying out any exploration activity in its other major concession area east of Thassos, where extensive geophysical surveys and exploratory drillings by Oceanic in the late 1970s had shown the presence of huge oil and gas deposits. Greece and Turkey nearly went to war in March 1987 over the mere possibility of Greek exploration east of Thasos, because a small part of this concession lay outside Greek territorial waters. Although it was within Greece's continental shelf, Papandreou was not willing to provoke a Turkish reaction. After that, any thoughts of letting NAPC explore east of Thassos were abandoned.
Since then, successive Greek governments have proposed to the Turkish side to resolve the whole continental shelf issue for the whole Aegean Sea by submitting the case for arbitration to the International Court of Justice at the Hague, a position which the Turks are now discussing with the Greek government but have not yet fully accepted.

Kavala Oil


Lucky strike: Kavalas Oil hits a major oil field, three nautical miles west of Thassos

Following NAPC's departure from Greece, the facilities and the primary concession areas at Prinos were taken over by Kavala Oil in a deal brokered by the government to safeguard 500 jobs. The majority shareholder (67 percent) at Kavala Oil was local construction firm Evrotechniki SA while the NAPC trade union took a minority stake of 33 percent.

This scheme-limited oil production continued, while some basic exploration work in the concession around Thassos was funded by the company's restricted cash flow Exploratory work in 2001 and 2002 indicated that the area around Prinos held a lot more oil than originally indicated. In order to carry out a major oil search in the area, Kavala Oil's management brought in a new shareholder, London Stock Exchange-listed Regal Petroleum, which after protracted negotiations, became the majority shareholder.

New exploratory drillings were carried out last October and November, as well as in early January this year. This led to a very promising new oil find in a drilling area known as Kallirachi. According to Kavala Oil geologists, the new deposit contains some 227 million barrels of oil, a reasonably large find by international standards. Not all of the deposit is recoverable, given the area's geological formations, but specialists point out that this may prove to be as large as the original Prinos deposit.

Kavala Oil's managing director Nicholas Loutsigas says that if the fields around Thassos including Kallirachi are properly explored, and with a modest investment of $50-80 million, the region is capable of producing some 40,000 to 50,000 bpd. From a political point of view this production area is quite secure, points out Loutsigas since it is 100 percent within Greece's own territorial waters.

Should Greece be successful in its efforts to delineate the continental shelf in the Aegean, the road is open for exploration of the region east of Thassos. Existing data suggest that oil deposits in that region amount to 900 million barrels (STB). Combined with potential production from the Prinos and Kallirachi deposits, the whole North Aegean area could be capable of delivering more than 200,000 bpd, say petroleum geologists familiar with the area. Greece would then be supplying many of its own needs.


ATHENS NEWS , 06/02/2004, page: A33
Article code: C13052A331


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[half greek]

EU told of hidden Greek oil riches.


(From Lloyds List)

GREECE has 'huge' hidden oil deposits it is unwilling to exploit for fear of upsetting Turkey, according to a Euro MP, writes Justin Stares in Brussels.

Greek oil deposits totalling 2bn barrels are said to exist in the Aegean region, enough to cancel out all oil import needs 'for many years'.

But Athens 'appears unwilling to exploit them so as not to trigger tension with Turkey which maintains a hostile and aggressive stance over the Aegean'.

The unrecognised resources were raised by Georgios Karatzaferis, who quoted a book by a Greek journalist claiming the government has known about deposits 'both under the seabed and on land' for decades.

'The Greek Minister of Development recently told the Hellenic parliament that the Public Electricity Board has faced costs of an additional €300m ($394m) since international oil prices began to rise,' Mr Karatzaferis told European Union Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs in a parliamentary question.

'Why does the commission not call on the Greek authorities to begin exploiting Greece's large oil deposits, since this will boost the entire economy of the Union?'

Mr Piebalgs replied that the Brussels executive 'is at present not in a position to confirm or disprove the allegations regarding possible unpublished oil deposits.

'Should it transpire and be confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that substantial and accessible oil deposits exist within Greece's territory, the commission will be ready to assess the impact of such findings.'

However, Brussels had no power to tell a member state how or if it should use its natural resources.


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[half greek]

PLATFORM TO SEARCH FOR OIL IN AEGEAN ON ITS WAY

Aegean Sea is the new target of Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) which speeded up its oil exploration activities at coasts of Turkey.

An Australian flagged oil exploration platform "Atwood Southern Cross", which had been searching for natural gas and oil in the Black Sea, will carry out studies in the Aegean starting from January 2008.


YENI SAFAK (CONSERVATIVE)


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Remember the Imia crisis where the Turks tried to increase their territorial waters, also don't forget the Oil between Cyprus and Egypt.

[gmellos]

Originally Posted by half greek
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PLATFORM TO SEARCH FOR OIL IN AEGEAN ON ITS WAY

Aegean Sea is the new target of Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) which speeded up its oil exploration activities at coasts of Turkey.

An Australian flagged oil exploration platform "Atwood Southern Cross", which had been searching for natural gas and oil in the Black Sea, will carry out studies in the Aegean starting from January 2008.


YENI SAFAK (CONSERVATIVE)


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Remember the Imia crisis where the Turks tried to increase their territorial waters, also don't forget the Oil between Cyprus and Egypt.

I prey Hellas stands firm!!! We need to use the EU to our fullest advantage!!!

In the election year I expect Oil to drop to 40-60 with Haliburton releasing the oil it stole to drive up the prices!