Page 14 - EurOil Week 26 2019

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NEWS IN BRIEF
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Capricorn gets drill permit offshore Norway
e Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) has granted Capricorn Norge a drilling permit for the 6608/11-9 wildcat well and production licence 842.
Carpricorn operates production licence 842 with a 40% stake. Skagen44 and Pandion Energy each have 30% interests. e block was awarded in February 2016 and this is the rst well to be drilled at the site.
e well will be completed about 13 km northeast of the Norne eld. e NPD’s permit is contingent on the operator securing all other permits and consents required by other authorities prior to commencing the drilling activity.
July 26 2019
Prospex drills dry well in Romania
UK-based Prospex Oil and Gas said July 1 that its Bainet-2 well at the Suceava concession
in northeastern Romania had found no commercially recoverable hydrocarbons.
e company was therefore advised by the operator, Ra es Energy, that the well should be plugged and abandoned, Prospex said in a statement. ese winding-up operations will cost €520,000 ($591,000).
“Clearly the result of the well is not what we were looking for, however, our rst thoughts are to commend the operations team on the ground and our partner in the concession on the drilling of Bainet-2 without incident, within budget and on schedule. Bainet-2 had a favourable risk/reward trade- o ,” Prospex chairman Bill Smith said.
“However, as is the nature of oil and gas exploration, discoveries can only be made following success with the drillbit, regardless of the presence of a number of producing elds and historic discoveries on or around a licence, as is the case with Suceava.”
Prospex’s holds a 50% stake in the 984 square km concession through a wholly owned subsidiary, with the remaining interest held by Ra es Energy.
In March, Prospex said it has raised £800,000 ($1mn) via a share placing
to help nance its work in 2019 at the Suceava concession. It also announced that Romania’s National Agency for Mineral Resources (ANRM) had agreed to enlarge the exploration area in Suceava, which also includes a new gas prospect.
e AIM-quoted Prospex Oil and Gas is
focused on high impact onshore and shallow o shore European opportunities with short timelines to production. e company’s management acquires undervalued projects with multiple, tangible value trigger points that can be realised within 12 months of acquisition and then applying low cost re- evaluation techniques to identify and de-risk prospects.
July 1 2019
OMV Petrom starts new Black Sea campaign
OMV Petrom, the Romanian arm of Austria’s OMV, has announced the start of
a €30mn ($34mn) drilling campaign in the shallow waters of the Istria block in Romania’s section of the Black Sea. Two boreholes will be sunk by the end of the year, the company said in a statement.
“ e Istria block in the shallow waters
of the Black Sea has a history of over 30
years of oil and gas production. Although elds are mature and reached their plateau production years ago, sustained investment and adequate engineering solutions enable us to unlock additional resources and to mitigate production decline,” OMV Petrom board member Peter Zeilinger said.
e wells will be drilled to more than 2,000 metres below the seabed, in water depths of 50 metres. et will target the Lebada East eld, discovered in 1979.
OMV’s Black Sea assets comprise Istria and Neptun Deep, where together with partner ExxonMobil it made a discovery in 2012. Istria is currently owing 25,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of oil and gas.
OMV has a 51% stake in OMV Petrom, while the Romanian energy ministry has 20.6% and local investment fund Fondul Proprietatea holds a further 10%. A further 18.4% is in free oat
July 1 2019
Baker Hughes secures North Sea work
Baker Hughes, a General Electric (GE) company, has been awarded equipment and service contracts in the UK North Sea by London-based i3 Energy.
e contracts related to i3’s planned drilling programme this year at the Liberator and Serenity assets, as well as development work at Liberator next year.
In a statement, i3 said Baker Hughes
agreed that it would only receive its £3mn ($3.8mn) payment for the work until a er i3 receives its rst sales revenue from the Liberator development.
“We appreciate the con dence BHGE has shown in the quality of the Liberator oil eld in agreeing to receive payments from rst
oil revenues,” i3 CEO Majid Sha q said in a statement. “ is transaction will enable us to maximise the allocation of capital resources and contingency towards our 2019 drilling activities, and we look forward to welcoming BHGE as a partner as we establish a mutually bene cial long-term relationship to unlock the value in our assets.”
As part of the transaction, i3 will also issue BHGE warrants worth £3mn at an exercise price of 56.85p per ordinary share, totaling up to 5,277,045 warrants if fully issued. BHGE can exercise the warrants via cash settlement or in exchange for payments due under OFS or OFE contracts.
Junior noteholders will also be o ered participation in warrants on these same terms, i3 said, pro-rata to their ownership of i3 on
a fully-diluted basis and also pro-rata to the proportion of warrants fully issued to BHGE, which could total up to 1,566,572 warrants if all 5,277,045 warrants are issued to BHGE.
July 2 2019
UK gas prices climb on tight supply
UK wholesale gas prices rose on the morning of July 3, on the back of production outages in Norway. Intraday gas prices rose by 0.75 pence at 28.25 pence per therm, while day- ahead prices were up 0.20 pence at 27.40 per therm.
“It’s the issues in Norway pushing up (UK) prices,” a gas trader told Reuters.
e gas system is undersupplied by 25.8mn cubic metres (mcm), with demand forecast at 174.1mcm and owing at 148.3mcm per day, according to national grid data. Imports from Norway through the Langeled pipeline are estimated to be 14mcm on July 3, down from 23mcm the previous day.
An electricity failure at Norway’s Kollsnes gas processing plant (GPP) led to a 56.5mcm per day drop in production, according to its operator Gassco. e outage started on the evening of July 2 and is expected to last 24 hours. Disruptions at Norway’s Kviteborn
gas eld and Nyhamna gas processing plant have also reduced the country’s exports, with supplies to the UK totaling 31.5mcm on July 3.
July 3 2019
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Week 26 04•July•2019