The first exploratory drilling will begin at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, Environment and Energy Minister Theodoros Skylakakis said on Tuesday, speaking at the meeting of the “East Mediterranean Gas Forum” (EMGF) held in Athens.
As the minister pointed out, the gradual reduction of Russian natural gas imports to the EU increases the importance of the Eastern Mediterranean for ensuring energy security and diversifying Europe’s supply sources.
Greece already plays an important role in supplying European countries with gas from the Eastern Mediterranean region, which is transported in liquefied form, is gasified and introduced into the Greek network and further channeled through the existing international interconnections.
At the same time, the procedures for hydrocarbon investigations in Israel, Egypt, Cyprus and Greece are in progress.
Skylakakis made special reference to the development process of the “vertical” natural gas corridor with investments to enhance the transmission capacity from the Greek network to the north.
‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ – worldwide, as we slip down the slope of declining resource quality and diminishing returns on investment, we will see more and more of this kind of drilling and mining of lower and lower quality deposits. The really good stuff was the high quality cheap to produce enormous quantity deposits like texas and saudi oil. even the north sea oil was pretty high return (though still less than half the return of texas or saudi crude).. there have been attempts to get oil in greece multiple times even since the 1940s… it’s never worked out to be profitable regardless of the dollar price of oil at the moment. one shallow offshore well in the north aegean produced for about a decade, late 70s to mid 80s as i recall… production was a couple thousand barrels a day – about one percent of oil consumption in greece back then, not too different now either (oil consumption in greece in the 80s was about 200K b/day, in the height of the wealth bubble around ’05 it peaked around 450K, now down again to i think around 250K).
in case anyone wonders where all the madness that seems to be aimed at crushing us little people , comes from, it comes from the ruling class also having figured out that the party is winding down and they are desperately hanging on to ‘their’ share of the pie.