Wintershall, Germany’s biggest crude oil and natural gas producer, has abandoned plans to carry out further scientific research into shale gas in the “Rheinland” and “Ruhr” approved fields in the German province of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The decision comes as a result of a new fracking law that came into force in mid-February 2017. It still allows the use of hydraulic fracturing in traditional natural gas production - albeit subject to stricter regulations - but in unconventional reservoirs, only a small number of research projects will initially be possible.
In order to carry out basic research and further scientific exploration work, Wintershall had planned to take rock samples at a depth of up to 300 meters – with no deep wells or fracking. Although this is eligible for approval in accordance with the recent legislation, the Arnsberg District Government rejected an application to extend the Rheinland and Ruhr permits, officially stating that it “wanted to set an example”.
Wintershall board member Martin Bachmann said: “It’s regrettable that scientific findings and technological expertise have so little weight in this decision, and that open-ended exploration is being politically blocked in NRW, an important location for industry and science. In reality, Germany cannot afford to block knowledge.”
“As far as unconventional resources in Germany are concerned, [Wintershall] wants to carry out basic research. First of all, we want to find out what there is underground. In a country like Germany with scarce natural resources, we must ask ourselves what resources will be available to us in the future,” said Bachmann. Germany is seeing falling domestic conventional gas production and rapidly rising import dependency, largely on Russian gas or even fracked shale gas from the US in the form of LNG. But he said Wintershall would not be pursuing its application to extend the domestic shale gas research permits further.
In accordance with the package of fracking regulations which was passed by the Bundestag in summer 2016 and is now fully in force, the blanket ban on actual hydraulic fracturing in unconventional reservoirs (not just for research), will be checked again in 2021 after a pilot phase. Bachmann pointed out that they currently had no way of predicting what the state government’s attitude to fracking projects would be in four years’ time. Instead, the focus should now be on making the four pilot projects set out in the law work – with scientific supervision, transparently and with the involvement of all the relevant stakeholders.
The ruling was past despite the fracking ban in the NRW State Development Plan to which the Arnsberg District Government refers, being declared illegal by an expert report commissioned by the Federal Association for Natural Gas, Crude Oil and Geoenergy (BVEG). It claimed the fracking ban infringed on specialist legislation (water resources, nature and landscape conservation, mining laws), and so breaches constitutional law.