With a total storage capacity of more than six billion cubic meters of natural gas, RAG contributes to the security of supply of Austria and Central Europe.
After the State Treaty of 1955, the ÖMV, which had emerged from the Soviet Mineral Oil Administration (Sowjetische Mineralölverwaltung), began to dominate Eastern Austria.
The oil-bearing layers of the Gaiselberg field, located almost one kilometer south-west of Zistersdorf, cover an area of only about 2.5 km², but along a geological fracture (the so-called Steinbergbruch) there are a number of oil-bearing layers one above the other, whose depth ranges from 800 m to almost 2,400 m. During the period of the "Anschluss" of Austria to Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945, the RAG was continued as "enemy property" by a German asset manager.
As a result, the production rights in the Vienna Basin were also restricted to the two oil fields RAG/Gösting and Gaiselberg, which existed before 1945, and which remained so even after the withdrawal of the Soviet occupying power in 1955.
In May 1956, a new deep drilling rig made Austria's first major oil discovery outside the Vienna Basin near Puchkirchen.
As early as 1962, the most productive Austrian oil field outside the Vienna Basin to date was discovered in Voitsdorf in the municipality of Ried im Traunkreis.
In 1968, the highest annual production in the company's history was achieved with 419,118 tons of crude oil, more than half of which came from the Voitsdorf field.
After 2000, this led to several major oil discoveries in the eastern concession area around the health resort of Bad Hall.
Especially in western Upper Austria, about 15 km on each side of a line from Kremsmünster to Burghausen, a large number of medium-sized and smaller natural gas reservoirs were discovered, mostly at depths of 500 m to 1500 m. In 1997, the Haidach natural gas reservoir (Straßwalchen, Upper Austria) was discovered using modern geophysical methods.
[6] The current capacity in combination with the Haag storage facility is around 1.080 billion cubic metres of natural gas (2019).
20 km north of the existing storage facility, capacity was increased to 1.1 billion cubic metres of natural gas.
In May 2007, the Haidach storage facility at Straßwalchen went into operation, a collaboration project with the partners Gazprom Export and Wingas.
In addition, RAG is conducting research on the production of renewable gas in the Underground Sun Conversion project.
Hydrogen produced from wind and solar energy is converted into renewable gas underground in natural reservoirs using microorganisms and can thus be stored there in large quantities.
RAG's current core business is the large-scale storage of gaseous energy (methane, hydrogen) in natural underground reservoirs.
RAG is developing sustainable technologies to store renewable energy (sun, wind) and thus make it available to consumers efficiently and on a large scale.
Energy supply should be guaranteed throughout the year, especially during seasonal fluctuations due to peak in demand during longer periods of darkness or low water.
This unique method recreates the process by which natural gas originates, but shortens it by millions of years – like geological history in fast motion.