For Romania to increase its biogas production 50-fold, a step change is necessary, even if the level of support is sufficient to make most investments profitable.

2015 will be the year of new gas transport projects, which are to connect at regional level the Southern Gas Corridor to Central Europe´s North South Corridor. Domestically, the Black Sea coast will have to be linked to the National Transport System.

The 2018 calendar was supposed to bring a 3% increase in household gas prices as of 1 October 2014, as a first step towards timely liberalization. In light of the burden that would have thus fallen on households ahead of presidential elections held in December, the Government, through its Department of Energy, requested this delay.

The history of the oil and gas industry has been and is an intrinsic part of the economic and social development of modern Romania. Also, Romania has the prospect that, by the end of the current decade, it will become a top producer of hydrocarbons at European level – especially natural gas.

The Iaşi-Ungheni interconnector is a 43 km long pipeline meant to transport up to 1.5 bcm of gas per year from Romania to the Republic of Moldova, under the Prut River that constitutes the border between the two countries. Construction works only took one year, but they followed three years of talks between the two parties. Costs reached a total of €26.4m, most of which was covered by Brussels and Bucharest.

Compared to oil products, natural gas is clean burning, with virtually no particle and sulphur emissions, close to no NOx emissions, and lower CO2 emissions. Increasingly, it is also more affordable, despite higher logistics costs. Romania should follow the lead of many other countries around the world, and consider incentives for ship and truck owners to switch to natural gas.

COP21 (The Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC) will be the event of this fall and end of the year in environmental diplomacy. The intention is to achieve a “universal and legally binding agreement” to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) in order to keep global warming below 2° C from pre-industrial levels, beyond which it is presumed that the effects are irreversible.

The story of shale gas in Romania has somewhat been that of a fight. Chevron has had to deal with public opposition and outright protests, including clashes with police; mis- and dis-information, and a lack of understanding about the fracking procedure and its risks; overwhelming bureaucracy and a highly volatile and confusing legal procedure when it comes to unconventional gas drilling in the country, even though no moratorium was ever officially instated, like in neighboring Bulgaria.

Energy Policy Group, in partnership with the law firm Pachiu & Associates and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), organized the roundtable discussion – Is it necessary to revise the Romanian oil & gas legislation?