A partnership led by Statoil Petroleum AS will consider further exploratory drilling to clarify the potential of the Aldous Major North structure in the North Sea off Norway.

Gujarat State Petroleum Corp. Ltd. has spudded the first development well in Deen Dayal West gas-condensate field on the KG-OSN-2001/3 block off eastern India, said Jubilant Energy NV, Amsterdam.

Continental Resources Inc. reported the Moseley 105H, a conventional natural gas well, caught on fire Sept. 19 at 10 p.m., and the safest solution is to allow the well to continue burning for several days. Wild Well Control is supervising a managed burn.

The European Union urged Turkey to refrain from continuing to make threats in a dispute with the Republic of Cyprus over offshore oil and gas exploratory drilling in the East Mediterranean basin.

US crude oil and natural gas drilling rig activity gained 27 units this week, reaching a total of 1,985 working rigs. This week’s count is up by 324 units from the comparable period a year ago, Baker Hughes Inc. reported.

Zodiac Exploration Inc., Calgary, has established in its 1-10 well in Kings County, Calif., the presence of several deeper targets that its technical team had identified on 3D seismic shot in 2009 and is preparing to plug back and drill a horizontal leg into the Upper Kreyenhagen formation.

A final report into the April 2010 Macondo deepwater well blowout and resulting massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana identified a number of causes for the blowout, concluding that a central cause was failure of a cement barrier in the production casing string.

Hess Corp., New York, will take a farmout from Niko Resources Ltd., Calgary, to earn a 42.5% working interest in the Kofiau production sharing contract in the Salawati area of West Papua, Indonesia, subject to government approval.

Apache Corp. is planning a 235 sq mile 3D seismic survey in a lightly drilled area of the northern Texas Panhandle to explore for oil in the Pennsylvanian Canyon Wash formation.

Statoil signed a contract with North Atlantic Norway Ltd., a company in the Seadrill Group, to hire the West Hercules deepwater semisubmersible for exploration and production drilling internationally and on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

African Petroleum Corp. Ltd. said its Apalis-1 deepwater wildcat off Liberia confirmed the critical components of a working hydrocarbon system but found no commercial quality reservoir.

ConocoPhillips plans to establish a fund related to June oil spills at Penglai 19-3 field in Bohai Bay, saying the fund will be designed to address ConocoPhillips’s responsibilities in accordance with relevant laws of China and to benefit the general environment in Bohai Bay (OGJ Online, Sept. 6, 2010).