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Brief history of the country
Albania (the Republic of Albania) is bordered by Montenegro and Kosovo (north), Macedonia (east) and Greece (south). Its coast abuts the Adriatic and Ionian Seas on the west and southwest.
Albania had become part of Illyria by 400 BC and was incorporated into Roman provinces after 167 BC. Slavs began to overrun the region from 548 AD. It was captured by Bulgaria before establishment of the Kingdom of Albania by Charles of Anjou in 1271.
After being briefly ceded to Serbia, it was overrun by the Ottomans by 1431 who introduced Islam. Massive emigration to Christian countries occurred and Albania became an important Ottoman trading area. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1912, and under threat from its neighbours, the country declared independence.
The new kingdom was invaded by Italy in 1939 before falling under Nazi rule in 1943. Civil war between communists and nationalists led to a socialist republic being established in 1945. The government isolated the country from the international community and reformed it into a strict communist society.
In 1991 the Socialist Republic collapsed and after several years of economic turmoil some political stability was achieved. Free-market reforms have now opened Albania to foreign investment with the service sector dominating the economy.
Oil and gas summary
Most of Albania is mountainous. The highest mountain is Korab on the Macedonian border, at 2,764m. A narrow coastal plain lies along the Adriatic and Ionian Seas.
The country forms part of a foreland fold and thrust belt that includes Mesozoic to Eocene carbonate sequences of the Ionian Basin incorporated into thrust sheets over the Apulia foreland in the southwest.
These are overlain by foreland basin deposits of the Durresi Basin in the northwest. The region is seismically active between the Dinarides and the Hellenides tectonic zones and sediments are highly disrupted. Oil and gas fields in onshore western Albania all lie in the northern Durresi and southern Ionian basins.
Albania produced some oil from 1918 to 1920 with commercial production eventually beginning in 1934 in a central area of the Durresi basin. Most is heavy oil from the large Patos Marinze field discovered in 1926. The first discoveries in the Ionian basin were in the 1960s however, production from these complex fields has never matched that of Patos Marinze.
Before 1991 Albania was short of both capital and technology but increases in output have since been achieved with application of better production methods in the heavy oil area. Nevertheless output is unlikely to recover to former levels.
Offshore, interest in the Adriatic Sea has increased in recent years and some exploration may be expected in the long term although no production is forecast by Globalshift.
Albania is installing new infrastructure to use associated gas from its onshore oil fields and possible new discoveries and the country has begun to consume some of its previously flared gas.
ALBANIA
Map and National Flag
Southern Europe
Capital
Population
Land area (sq kms)
Oil prod (000s b/d)
Gas prod (bcm/yr)
Oil cons (000s b/d)
Gas cons (bcm/yr)
Tirana
3.2 mm
28,748
22
0.15
29
0.15
Government
Albania is a parliamentary democracy. The head of state is the President, elected to a 5-year term by the Assembly. The President appoints the Chairman (prime minister) of the Council of Ministers (cabinet).
Elections are held every 4 years to the 140-member unicameral People’s Assembly of the Republic
In 2014, the Republic of Albania became an official candidate for accession to the EU.
The Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy oversees the oil and gas industry with blocks awarded by the Albanian National Agency for Natural Resources (AKBN)..
Albpetrol, answering directly to the Ministry, is the state-owned production and marketing company which monitors petroleum agreements. It was created in 1993.
PATOS MARINZE
Old heavy oil field
ALBANIA: TECTONIC SETTING
Globalshift.co.uk (source: DocSlide)
Geology and History of Exploration
Albania lies within a tectonically active and complex geologic region associated with thrust faulting along the Adriatic-Apulian plate boundary. It is a foreland fold and thrust belt system that includes Mesozoic to Eocene carbonate sequences of the Ionian Basin in the south and overlying foreland basin deposits of the Durresi Basin in the centre and north.
The lower sequences are deformed within three Tertiary thrust sheets that verge towards the Apulian foreland and produce mountain ranges along the Balkan Peninsula.
The Durresi/Ionian Basin - was created by anticlockwise rotation of the Apulian foreland along with its uplifted promontory in the southwest of Albania which acted as a buffer to Ionian basin thrusts during the Oligocene to Pliocene.
The thrusts were uplifted and exhumed in the south while propagating in the north towards the foreland before being overlain by the Durresi foredeep basin during the Miocene and Pliocene.
Oil source rocks are present in Triassic and Jurassic sediments of the Ionian Basin buried beneath the southern part of the Durresi Basin. The beginning of oil generation is related to this burial.
Two types of reservoirs exist. Deep water carbonates of Late Cretaceous to Eocene age are fractured with vuggy porosity while flysch and molasse deposits of the foreland basin also act as reservoirs.
History - Surface occurrence of bitumen in Albania was recorded by the Greeks and Romans. In 1875 the Turkish Government granted rights to exploration in the Selenica region to a French company which mined and exported asphalt for road construction until 1918. Meanwhile surface mapping by Austrians and Italians was carried out and a geological map was compiled for northern Albania.
An oil seep seen at Drashovica near Vlora led to the first well in 1918. The well produced 20 to 30 bbls per day for 2 years from Oligocene flysch at shallow depths. It was abandoned in 1920.
In 1925 the Albanian government awarded further concessions and drilling was carried out in the areas where seeps and bitumen impregnation had been mapped. The wells identified a number of potential fields including Europe’s largest onshore oil and gas field, Patos (later Patos Marinze), drilled in 1926 in the Durresi Basin, and the nearby Kucova field. Both have reservoirs in Miocene sandstones.
Kucova was developed in 1935 but most of Albania’s oil has been produced from Patos since 1939. In 1951 Russians acquired the first onshore seismic data and in 1957 the Marinze field was discovered adjacent to Patos.
This was followed in the early 1960s by a number of other oil and gas discoveries with deep carbonate reservoirs such as Visoka in 1963, Gorisht in 1966 and Ballsh in 1967. Gas discoveries were also made in molasse sediments including Divjaka in 1963 and Frakulla in 1965.
In the 1980s the Albanian state company DPNG took responsibility for mapping the coastal zone and further gas discoveries were made including Balaj-Kryevidh in 1983, Durresi in 1986, Povelca in 1987, Panaja in 1988 and the Delvina gas and condensate field in the south in 1989.
Operations in all the developed fields relied on ancient Russian and later Chinese built vehicles, pumps and facilities until the 1990s when Western companies were first allowed to invest.
After 1990 the country opened itself to foreign investment. A number of companies took out onshore and offshore licences, and large volumes of seismic were acquired followed by several exploration wells.
A small non-commercial discovery of condensate and biogenic gas in Upper Miocene sandstones was made offshore by the A4-1X well drilled in 1983 by Agip and Chevron. The first onshore discovery by western companies was Shpirag in 2001 within the Sqepuri subthrust which contained light oil in a fractured reservoir of Late Cretaceous to Eocene age.
A number of companies have licenses to operate onshore and offshore which has led to a tripling of the country’s heavy oil production since 2004 using modern pumping systems and horizontal drilling.
Exploration activities increased, both onshore and offshore, with operators using modern seismic data. Production of oil from Albania peaked in 1974. Gas output could grow significantly when new associated and complex free gas fields in the Ionian Basin are developed.