Norway: Lundin Strikes Oil in the North Sea

Lundin Norway AS, operator of production licence 338, is in the process of completing the drilling of wildcat well 16/1-14. The well is being drilled about 4 km northwest of the 16/1-8 (”Luno”) oil discovery and 3 km south of the 16/1-9 (”Draupne”) oil discovery.

The objective of the well was to prove petroleum in Middle Jurassic reservoir rocks (the Hugin formation), as an extension of Draupne.

As expected, the Hugin formation has good reservoir properties, but is dry. However, oil was encountered in two reservoir levels above the Hugin formation. One of the levels has an oil column of approximately ten metres in the Lower Cretaceous/Upper Jurassic sandstone layers, with good reservoir quality. The other level has a total of about 40 gross metres of oil column in Paleocene sandstone strata (the Heimdal formation) with variable reservoir quality.

The well was not formation-tested, but extensive data acquisition and sampling have been carried out. The oil in the Heimdal formation is of the same type as in ”Luno”, while the underlying oil in the Lower Cretaceous/Upper Jurassic is very light.

Preliminary estimates indicate that the size of the discoveries are between 2 and 10 million standard cubic metres (Sm3) recoverable oil in production licence 338. The discoveries will require further delineation before the licensees in the production licence can assess these together with other nearby discoveries.

The well is the fifth exploration well in production licence 338, which was awarded in APA 2004. 16/1-14 was drilled to a vertical depth of 2550 metres below the sea surface, and was terminated in the Skagerrak formation in the Upper Triassic. Water depth at the site is 110 metres.

The well will now be permanently plugged and abandoned. Well 16/1-14 was drilled by the Transocean Winner drilling facility, which will now proceed to production licence 409 in the North Sea to drill wildcat well 16/7-9 where Lundin Norway is the operator.

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Source: NPD  ,December  1, 2010; Image: NWEA