US energy giant Chevron is terminating its operations in Romania due to poor exploration results and prolonged protests by environmentalists. The withdrawal from this fracking project will mark the end of the company’s shale gas exploration in Europe, RT reported.
Because of falling oil prices and underwhelming results in Europe, Chevron is now switching its focus to home soil. Last month, the company announced it was halting it projects in Poland, and terminated shale-gas agreements in Lithuania and Ukraine.
“That leaves Romania, where we are in the process of relinquishing our concession interests,” a Chevron spokesman said, without specifying why it was relinquishing its interest in the country.
While the US Energy Information Administration had previously estimated that Romania could potentially recover enough gas to cover domestic demand for more than a century, the exploration failures resulted in the country’s prime minister, Victor Ponta, saying last year that it looks like Romania “does not have shale gas.”
Globally, Chevron’s 2014 failure rate stood at 30 percent, as compared to 18 percent in 2013, according to Bloomberg. Sixteen of the 53 wells the company drilled were found to have had
In other parts of Europe, such as Germany and France, fracking is under a moratorium, while the UK’s pursuit of the energy source is bound by strict regulations.
