The Government will not proceed with the public tender to award seven new licenses for the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, one of them in the Algarve, which had been announced in September by the Government of Passos Coelho.
An official source at the Ministry of Economy, led by Manuel Caldeira Cabral, told the newspaper Económico that "the competition will not go forward".
This despite the fact that Prime Minister António Costa said, in the last biweekly debate, that «it is absolutely essential for the country to know its natural resources and continue prospecting operations» of hydrocarbons.
Last September, José Miguel Martins, the then head of the National Entity for the Fuel Market (ENMC), had said that "a tender was being prepared for the attribution of areas". At issue were 'four areas in the shallow offshore (shallow waters) in the Porto basin, two other areas in the deep offshore (deep water) in the Porto basin and an area in the deep offshore of the Algarve basin'.
At the time, according to the official, the intention was for the competition to move forward in "end of October, beginning of November". But the tender was never launched, not least because this is not the best time to talk about investments in the area of hydrocarbons, given the sharp drop in the price of crude in international markets.
Also recently, Repsol, which leads a consortium comprising the Portuguese company Partex (of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), and which planned to start, at the end of 2015, the drilling of its first natural gas prospecting well in ultra-deep waters in the Algarve, asked the Government to postpone this investment of more than 50 million dollars. Officially, the Spanish group chose to extend the study phase for another year.
Two weeks ago, at a public session promoted by ENMC in Faro, the current president of that entity, Paulo Carmona, said that, since 2011, the oil companies holding the five concessions awarded in Portugal have already invested 58 million euros, only in prospecting and research, having only found “evidence” of hydrocarbons, with no commercial interest to explore.
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