Galp will give up on oil exploration off Aljezur. Carlos Gomes da Silva, executive president of the company, announced the decision, this Monday, at the conference call with analysts, second advances the Jornal de Negócios.
The leader of Galp told analysts that "in relation to Portugal, we took the decision to abandon exploration".
In a statement, the ENI/GALP consortium has also made official “the decision to abandon the frontier exploration project in the Alentejo basin. Although we regret the impossibility of assessing the country's potential offshore resources [at sea], the existing conditions made it objectively impossible to continue exploration activities».
The ENI/Galp consortium had already assumed, in a letter made known by the newspaper Expresso, not being able to move forward with the oil exploration well, off Aljezur, this year.
According to the Expresso, the letter was "sent to the National Fuel Market Entity, with knowledge to the Ministry of the Sea, General Directorate of Maritime Resources (DGRM) and General Directorate of Energy."
In this letter, sent in August, the consortium explained that the suspension of work, decreed by the Administrative Court of Loulé, "has the immediate consequence of the legal impossibility of carrying out the survey" and that "the postponement is, once again, inevitable".
These prospecting works were scheduled for September, but the precautionary measure of the Algarve Livre de Petróleo Platform prevented them from moving forward.
The argument, at the time, was, according to the letter, that "there was a violation by the DGRM of the norms of public discussion", for not having made available the monitoring studies of cetaceans when this process was publicly consulted.
The current contract, of ENI/Galp, ends in January 2019, without being able to be extended again.
Updated at 14:25 pm with the content of the ENI/Galp communiqué.
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