Drilling continues in Austria: OMV announced on Friday morning that it had made the largest gas discovery in Austria for 40 years. In the Wittau Tief-2a well in Lower Austria, the domestic oil company encountered “potentially recoverable resources of around 48 TWh (28 million barrels of oil equivalent)”, according to a press release. That could increase domestic gas production by 50 percent from spring 2025.
More than a year after the start of the Ukraine war, Austria is still heavily dependent on gas supplies from Russia. “As we work on our strategy to diversify our gas supply sources, this new discovery is an important contribution to the gas supply of our customers, especially in Austria, with an expected increase in our local production,” says Alfred Stern, Chairman and CEO of OMV AG . Extensive drilling and a connection of the reservoir to the gas plant at Aderklaa, which is about 10 kilometers from the site, are now being examined.
In 2018, a gas supply contract between OMV and Gazprom was extended until 2040 – according to the contract, OMV also has to pay if it no longer needs the gas. Meanwhile, BP LNG supplies have been negotiated for ten years from 2026 to supply up to a million tonnes of gas – that’s about 14 TWh. OMV is already getting gas supplies from Norway, but it wouldn’t work without Gazprom.
The fact that OMV, which wants to convert itself to a low-CO2 business, wants to produce more gas in Austria again, meets with resistance just hours after the announcement. IG Windkraft, the lobby of wind power operators in Austria, advises leaving the gas in the ground. Even if it is the largest gas discovery in 40 years, it is put into perspective.
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According to IG Windkraft, this amount of energy from the gas field – the 48 TWh mentioned – corresponds to just the production of 100 wind turbines over the probable useful life of the gas field of 25 years. “If the electricity from the wind turbines is refined using heat pumps, it doesn’t even need 30 wind turbines to provide the same amount of heat,” says IG Windkraft.
And further: “In 2022, 38 wind turbines were installed in Lower Austria alone. During their lifetime, these generate more energy than the largest Austrian gas find in 40 years,” says Stefan Moidl, Managing Director of IG Windkraft. “The only difference is that the gas field is empty after 25 years and Austria has blown an additional 10 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. However, the wind does not stop blowing and can continue to be used from generation to generation without any greenhouse gas emissions.”
IG Windkraft is now appealing to OMV to invest in wind power rather than gas production. The industrial company has lots of space in windy regions of Austria.
IG Windkraft: Austria falls behind in Europe when it comes to renewables