Petrobaltic, formed 15 years ago by the U.S.S.R., Poland, and East Germany to explore for oil and gas in the Baltic Sea, has ceased activity as a three nation combine.
However, a Warsaw report says the firm will continue to exist with the same name and operate as a joint stock company under the Polish state treasury. The new Petrobaltic enterprise hopes to reach agreement "with foreign capital" and to find work for its mobile rig, a Dutch built jack up, outside of the Baltic.
Poland will have to pay its former partners about 7 million rubles for their interests in the combine's assets.
Organized in 1975, Petrobaltic began offshore geophysical surveys in 1976. The group's jack up spudded its first wildcat on the Polish shelf in 1980. It also worked in the Soviet and German sectors of the Baltic.
Several oil and gas discoveries, apparently noncommercial, were drilled off Poland. In 1984 commercial oil was found in 98 ft of water off the U.S.S.R.'s Kaliningrad Province. Several more wells were slated to be drilled from a platform at the Kaliningrad Province location off Cape Taran, but Moscow said plans were abandoned because of protests by environmentalists.
Soviet Azerbaijan recently signed an intergovernmental agreement providing for assistance in developing Lithuania's potential offshore Baltic oil deposits northeast of Kaliningrad Province.
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