In 2022, EMOV completed the acquisition of Sand Hill Petroleum, a private company in the Netherlands that owns and operates upstream and midstream assets in Hungary and Romania.
Sand Hill produces more than 300,000 m3/day of natural gas from license concessions in central and north-east Hungary. The concession areas include exploration and development opportunities with the potential to substantially increase production and reserves over time. Sand Hill completed a drilling programme in its production hub in north-east Hungary in 2024 and will commence a new programme in Romania and Hungary in 2025.
Sand Hill is also the owner and operator of two natural gas processing, treatment and storage facilities in Hungary. These sites have combined capacity of 950,0000 m3/day and are used to process the company’s gas and condensate production, with excess capacity available for future production growth and for processing third-party gas and liquids. In addition, Sand Hill is evaluating the possibility of connecting these gas processing facilities to its exploration concession areas in Romania.
The Sand Hill acquisition provided EMOV with an operating platform in central Europe that includes natural gas transportation and processing infrastructure, a portfolio of exploration and development prospects and a strong operating team.
In 2024, EMOV successfully exited its position in Nostrum Oil and Gas, a UK-listed independent oil and gas company with assets in the Caspian region, in which EMOV had acquired 18.9% of the issued shares. This was EMOV’s first investment in a listed company where EMOV became an active, industry shareholder working closely with the management and board.
Nostrum is an integrated upstream-midstream company whose primary production asset is the Chinarevskoye field in north-west Kazakhstan which was developed under a Production Sharing Agreement. Daily production of natural gas and condensate averaged approximately 11,500 BOE/day in 2023.
In 2024, EMOV and the ClonBio Group founded Danube CCS Ventures, a company focused exclusively on carbon capture and storage in Europe. The first CCS project is under development in Hungary and will collect, compress, dehydrate, pipe and inject bio-CO2 into permanent storage using proven technologies. Once this project is operational, Danube CCS Ventures will become Europe’s largest full chain industrial carbon removals company.
An EMOV subsidiary, working together with Danube CCS Ventures, received an exploration permit under the EU CCS Directive in 2024 and completed a 3D seismic survey the same year. Danube CCS Ventures has also qualified for grant support through the EU Innovation Fund. With the preliminary engineering design complete and the subsurface evaluation underway, Danube CCS Venture’s will commence industrial scale CO2 injection in 2027.
This CCS business draws on EMOV’s existing capabilities and adds an strategic energy transition dimension to its portfolio – allowing EMOV to participate directly in moving towards a low carbon future.