Gas producer sees potential for increase in natural gas production

Germany has never been a wonderland for oil and natural gas. Domestic production was always seen as a supplement to the extensive imports of both fossil fuels. Only around two percent of oil requirements were covered by domestic production in 2021, and around five percent for natural gas. Due to high energy prices, however, production sites in Germany remain attractive for companies such as Wintershall Dea and ExxonMobil. And with Russia's attack on Ukraine, the issue of security of supply, which had hardly played a role in Germany in previous years, came back onto the public agenda.

The focus of German oil and gas production has long been in northern Germany. "By far the most promising oil and gas province in Germany is the North German Basin - and here in particular Lower Saxony," reports the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) in Hanover at the request of WELT AM SONNTAG. In technical jargon, "hopeful" means "promising" and "productive" in terms of deposits. "Other oil and gas provinces are primarily the North Sea, the Upper Rhine Graben, the foothills of the Alps and the Thuringian Basin."

In the case of natural gas in particular, domestic production could be increased relatively quickly, Wintershall Dea believes: "Over the next few years, conventional production in Germany could be increased from five to up to ten percent of national demand without fracking technologies," says Germany boss Robert Frimpong. His company also wants to expand natural gas production "by probably ten percent in the next three to four years". Lower Saxony's Ministry of the Environment says, however, that in recent times the dialogue with the energy industry has only been about "stabilizing" the funding to the current status.

So far, the social democrat Olaf Lies has been in charge of Lower Saxony's environment department in a coalition government of SPD and CDU. After the state elections on October 9, the SPD and the Greens are currently forming a new alliance. The Ministry of the Environment now falls to the Greens, who fundamentally reject higher oil and gas production in Germany. A plan approval procedure in Lower Saxony for natural gas production in an offshore field north-west of the island of Borkum is still pending. The Dutch company One-Dyas wants to produce natural gas there, also from German territory.

Germany has already dug most of its economically recoverable oil and gas reserves out of the ground. By the end of 2021, around 313 million tons of crude oil had been produced in Germany. The BGR writes that there are still around 23 million tonnes of "proven and probable reserves". Around 1071 billion cubic meters of natural gas had been produced by the end of 2021. BGR currently puts proven and probable natural gas reserves at 42 billion cubic meters. "What proportion of resources could be transferred to reserves remains open," it says. "Oil and natural gas production in Germany has been declining for many years, which is mainly due to the increasing depletion of existing deposits and insufficient new discoveries."

The experts use “resources” to describe the potential they have identified in a raw material that could be mined. "Reserves" are that smaller portion thereof that would be economically recoverable. The transition between the two categories is fluid. What can be extracted "economically" depends on the technologies available in each case as well as on the current price of crude oil or natural gas. As exploration and production technologies become more and more efficient, reserves in a certain deposit can still have the same or even higher level years later, although it has been continuously mined - because at the same time access to the raw material has become better and better.

It is also clear to environmentalists that oil and gas production must be stopped. "There shouldn't be any new drilling for oil and gas," says Gerald Neubauer, campaigner at Greenpeace Germany in Hamburg. "The scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) clearly state: In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees and to comply with the Paris climate goals, no more new oil and gas fields may be developed worldwide." Instead of more oil and gas Germany would have to invest massively in renewable domestic energy such as sun, wind and geothermal energy. At the same time, energy consumption must drop significantly, for example through a speed limit, building insulation and accelerated installation of heat pumps.

In Germany, too, the question of whether natural gas should be extracted using so-called unconventional fracking is now being discussed again. The layers of rock that contain natural gas are blasted open with the help of pressure and chemicals than in conventional production. The proponents of this method point to the enormous resources that would come within economic reach. In Germany, however, unconventional fracking is banned across the board. This will probably not change, despite occasional advances from politicians such as the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU). Andreas Hagedorn, for example, chairman of the Professional Association of German Geoscientists (BDG), considers the development of shale gas deposits using modern fracking technologies to be justifiable - the total potential of the technically recoverable natural gas is about 40 times as high as Germany's previous annual gas imports from Russia.

Ultimately, Germany will also be supplied to an increasing extent with natural gas that was obtained with the help of unconventional fracking. A significant proportion of the deep-frozen, liquefied natural gas (LNG) that Germany intends to import from the USA in the coming years comes from such sources.