OMV (Norge) AS and partners will evaluate an oil discovery in North Sea production license 817 to define the volume potential in different reservoir zones and assess the discovery alongside other prospects in the area, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate said in a release Apr. 20.
Exploration well 15/2-2 S, the first in the license, was drilled by the Deepsea Yantai drilling rig about 5 km west of Gudrun field and about 230 km west of Stavanger in water depth of 111 m. The well was drilled to a vertical depth of 4,723 m subsea. It was terminated in the Draupne formation in the Upper Jurassic.
The objective was to prove petroleum in reservoir rocks in the intra-Draupne formation from the Upper Jurassic. The well encountered the 500-m-thick intra-Draupne formation, consisting of multiple thin sandstone layers totaling 23 m with poor reservoir properties.
The well was not formation-tested, but data acquisition and sampling were undertaken.
Oil samples were taken from two different sand layers with different pressure regimes. Oil shows were also registered throughout the entire interval in the Upper Jurassic. It will now be permanently plugged.
Due to the limited thickness of the sandstone layers and uncertainty in their dispersion, the preliminary estimate of the size of the discovery is 0.95-5.55 million standard cu m of recoverable oil equivalent.
OMV (Norge) AS is operator of the license with 50% interest. Partners are Neptune Energy Norge AS (30%) and Source Energy AS (20%).
The rig is now moving to North Sea production license 1148, operated by Wellesley Petroleum AS.