Statoil ASA struck oil with a wildcat well drilling in the central North Sea as part of a government-encouraged effort to find small crude reservoirs near existing offshore fields, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate announced Tuesday.
OSLO, Norway -- Statoil ASA struck oil with a wildcat well drilling in the central North Sea as part of a government-encouraged effort to find small crude reservoirs near existing offshore fields, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate announced Tuesday.
The light oil and small natural gas deposits were found at a prospect called Ermintrude, north of Statoil's Sleipner field and about 175 kilometers (110 miles) off the western Norway port of Stavanger. Wildcat wells are exploratory and generally dug in areas not known to be productive.
The government directorate said the find was not production tested, but that initial estimates put the size of the find at about 50 million recoverable barrels of oil. The state-controlled company was planning a second well to help assess the extent of the find.
The well was drilled under a 2003 license granted under the government's Awards in Predefined Areas program, which the Nordic country hopes will offset declining oil production by spurring the search for small finds near fields already in operation.
Statoil will now consider whether the find, made in a depth of 114 meters (375 feet) of water, can be commercially exploited by tying it in to an existing production platform, such as Sleipner. Using existing infrastructure dramatically reduces the cost of developing a small oil find.
Statoil, based in Stavanger, owns 100 percent of the find.
Norway is still a major oil producer, but slipped from being the world's third largest exporter to the fifth largest earlier this year.
------
On the Net:
Source: Associated Press
Contact Info:
