The oil hole, off Aljezur, "will not be done", guaranteed, this Thursday, December 6, João Matos Fernandes, minister of Environment and Energy Transition. The government official's statements come on the same day that the PALP went public to say that the General Directorate of Energy and Geology had placed the ENI/Galp contracts as being active.
The Algarve Livre de Petróleo Platform said in a press release that, since the announcement by ENI/Galp of the withdrawal of the bore, in October, “litigation by the Ministry of the Sea, as well as the concessionaires” has continued.
"They appealed against the decision rendered by the Administrative Court of Loulé, contested the main action linked to that action and they were joined by the Ministry of the Environment, which challenged the action proposed by PALP, which calls into question the opinion issued by the Portuguese Environment Agency" , explained the Algarve Oil Platform.
In July of this year, it became known that ENI/Galp was prohibited from proceeding with the prospecting work due to an injunction imposed by the Platform Algarve Livre de Petróleo.
Later, in October, Carlos Gomes da Silva, CEO of Galp, revealed, in a conference call with analysts, the withdrawal of the oil prospecting hole.
This Thursday, Matos Fernandes, who participated in the closing of the seminar “Circular Economy of the Algarve”, at the Regional Coordination and Development Commission, in Faro, guaranteed that "the hole will not be drilled because the bidder has given up on doing it, in such a way that he is not even entitled to any compensation."
However, says the PALP, «the proclamation by the concessionaires to abandon the exploration project in the Alentejo basin did not translate into any act that would put an end to the ongoing lawsuits».
Confronted with this, the minister of Environment and Energy Transition said that "whoever takes the action must withdraw it", but considered the issue "absolutely irrelevant".
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