OMV presents investment and drilling program for Upstream in Austria

News Release, September 29, 2016 - 11:15 am (CEST)

• OMV Austria is the group’s global technology center
• Significant increase in investments in Austria of around 40% in the mid-term
• 12 OMV drillings planned in Weinviertel, Lower Austria, in 2017

“OMV Austria is the global technology center for the entire group and therefore the basis of our worldwide success”, said OMV Executive Board Member for Upstream Johann Pleininger when presenting the work program for OMV in Austria. In the coming years, OMV will undertake another significant increase in investment in Austria in order to support domestic oil and gas production and further develop technological innovation – with a planned investment increase of around 40 percent. One key precondition is an oil price environment that also permits such investment. The increased investments are already included in the OMV Group CAPEX guidance of approximately EUR 2.4 bn for 2017/2018.

In 2017 the international, integrated oil and gas company headquartered in Vienna and with a large subsidiary in Gänserndorf, OMV Austria, will carry out twelve drillings in Weinviertel, Lower Austria. “With the new drilling program, OMV is once again underlining its commitment to Gänserndorf as a business location”, said OMV Board Member Pleininger. The planned projects involve both exploratory and production drilling for crude oil and natural gas.

For the full year 2015 OMV achieved oil and gas production in Austria of around 32,000 barrels a day, or almost 12 million barrels in total. Production thereby broadly held steady against the previous year.
OMV Austria thereby covers 10 percent of the domestic demand for crude oil and 15 percent of the country’s demand for natural gas. This is primarily thanks to the advanced technology developed by OMV for exploiting mature oil and gas fields. OMV Board Member Pleininger: “Thanks to the technology we have advanced, depending on the reservoir, we manage to extract up to 60 percent of the available crude oil and up to 90 percent of the available natural gas”. These are top rates when compared internationally: The average international oil recovery rate is around 40 percent per reservoir, with a maximum of 80 percent recovered from gas fields.

Technological developments that OMV realizes successfully in Austria have been perfected on certain projects and are applied within the OMV Group worldwide; these have also attracted great interest among international partners from the oil and gas industry. In addition to the expertise regarding the oil recovery rate, OMV also holds various records in applying drilling techniques such as directional and horizontal drilling. What’s more, the operating hours of the approx. 1,070 active wells in Austria have achieved record levels in worldwide comparisons.

Thanks to the planned investments, further technological innovation to improve production from reservoirs is expected in the coming year; first at OMV in Austria, then in the group throughout the whole world.

At present OMV Austria also employs techniques such as water injection and steam injection. These measures allow the pressure in the reservoirs to be maintained or increased in an environmentally sound manner.

OMV Executive Board Member for Upstream Johann Pleininger summing up: “OMV Austria will continue to play a key role within the group in the coming years. Austria is the basis of our worldwide success and the corporate strategy specifies that it is clearly the number one core area”.

About OMV Executive Board Member for Upstream Johann Pleininger
Johann Pleininger took over as OMV Executive Board Member responsible for Upstream in September 2015. Born in Lower Austria (Spannberg), he joined OMV in 1977 as an apprentice in Gänserndorf. After holding various posts within the company and completing his studies in mechanical engineering and economics, Pleininger played a decisive role in the Romanian OMV Petrom as the Executive Board Member for Exploration and Production in Bucharest (2007 bis 2013).

OMV Aktiengesellschaft
With Group sales of EUR 23 bn and a workforce of around 24,100 employees in 2015, OMV Aktiengesellschaft is one of Austria’s largest listed industrial companies. In Upstream, OMV focuses on three core regions – CEE (Romania, Austria), North Sea as well as Middle East and Africa – and selected development areas. 2015 daily production stood at approximately 303 kboe/d. In Downstream, OMV has an annual refining capacity of 17.8 mn tonnes and approximately 3,800 filling stations in 11 countries including Turkey as of end 2015. OMV operates a gas pipeline network in Austria and gas storage facilities in Austria and Germany. In 2015, gas sales volumes amounted to around 110 TWh.