Statoil Petroleum AS, a fully owned subsidiary of Norwegian oil company Statoil ASA (STO), has encountered a marginal discovery near the Sleipner East field in the Norwegian North Sea.
The affiliate is on the verge of completing the drilling operations of wildcat well 16/7-10, which met a thin gas/condensate column in a 115-metre thick reservoir. The well − situated in the Statoil Petroleum operated production license (“PL”) 569 − was drilled 16 kilometers northeast of the Sleipner field.
Ocean Vanguard drilled the well that was proposed to prove petroleum in Paleocene reservoir rocks and the licensees will continue to assess the discovery together with other nearby discoveries. The well stands as the pioneer exploration well in production license 569, which was awarded in the Awards in Predefined Areas (or APA) 2010.
Statoil enjoys a 59.6% share in the license, along with other co-operators like U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil Corporation (XOM) holding 30.4% and France’s Total SA (TOT) controlling 10% interests.
The latest find follows Statoil’s small hydrocarbon discovery last week, the third one in a row near the prospective Gullfaks South area, following the earlier Rutil and Opal finds. The company completed exploration wells – 34/10-52 A and B – in its production license 50 in the neighborhood of its Gullfaks South field in the North Sea off Norway.
According to the preliminary approximation, the discovery in PL 50 holds between 0.5 and 1.5 million cubic meters of recoverable oil equivalent.
These discoveries, although trivial in nature, demonstrate Statoil’s relentless effort to reinvigorate recovery in the mature fields, with an emphasis on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Statoil is facing production glitches of late and is continuously shifting its focus to the still unexplored areas of the Norwegian Sea, projecting an equity production of above 2.5 MMBOE by 2020. Our long-term Neutral recommendation on Statoil remains unchanged at this stage.
