Saipem’s flagship vessel Castorone was contracted to start work this summer on Turkey’s offshore deepwater Sakarya gas field while neighboring Romania prepared to enter Phase 2 of its Neptun Deep gas project.
Blessed with some of the same source rock as the hydrocarbon-prolific Caspian Sea (they were one sea in the geologic past), the Black Sea has long been regarded as a frontier basin of great promise, but with unique challenges—earthquakes, sheer slopes plunging to 2200-m depths where sediments are unstable, its bottom-water harbors H2S instead of oxygen, and complex life is nowhere to be found.
Straddling Europe and Asia, the Black Sea is surrounded by Turkey, Russia, and other remnants of the USSR and the czarist empire before it: Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Georgia. There is also only one way in and one way out, via Istanbul and the Bosphorus Strait whose width varies from 3.7 km (2.3 miles) to 750 m (2,450 ft).
The Bosphorus has long been the southern export route for Russian (and Soviet) oil loaded on tankers at Novorossiysk for transport to the Mediterranean, and over years the Black Sea has become crisscrossed by gas pipelines, most notably the Blue Stream and TurkStream, which seemingly cemented Turkey’s role as a transit state and major consumer of Russian gas.
Times, though, have changed.
With energy security through diversity of supply now top of mind, Romania and Turkey are driving their own exploration and production projects to identify and develop deepwater gas reserves to supply domestic needs as they simultaneously strategize to become future exporters through such infrastructure as the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and liquified natural gas (LNG).
Ukraine and Russia, meanwhile, are the wildcards in the region, considering that the largest deepwater deposits in the Black Sea are believed to lie in the unexplored waters of Ukraine.
Neptun Deep To Position Romania as Largest EU Gas Producer
In June 2023, 50/50 partners Austria’s OMV Petrom and Romanian state-owned Romgaz Black Sea Ltd. took a final investment decision (FID) to proceed with their $4.4-billion Neptun Deep gas project, which data and analytics provider Wood Mackenzie (Woodmac) notes, will make Romania the largest gas producer in the EU.
Neptun Deep is the first deepwater development on the Romanian shelf which is part of the northwestern Black Sea Continental Shelf (Fig. 1). According to Woodmac, it was the EU’s largest upstream FID in 2023.
With an estimated 100 Bcm in reserves, Neptun Deep aims to produce first gas in 2027 from two fields: the deepwater Domino gas field at 1000-m depth and the shallow-water Pelican Sud (South) at 120-m depth.
