Deltic Energy plc has formally secured the Blackadder prospect and Pharos-Teviot discoveries, immediately west of the West Sole gas field.
POTENTIAL
Licence P2672, covering blocks 47/5e, 47/10c and 48/6c, was one of two provisionally awarded to the company in the third tranche of the UK’s 33rd offshore licensing round.
Drilled in 2013, discovery well 47/05d-6 targeted what was originally interpreted to be a standalone prospect formerly called Pharos.
Deltic said its preliminary understanding of the structural setting suggested that Pharos and Blackadder are a single Leman Sandstone structure.
Blackadder / Pharos holds preliminary P50 prospective resources of 165 bcf while Teviot in 47/10-8 has 17 bcf.
Deltic added that revised structural mapping indicated the well intersected the materially larger Blackadder structure in a downdip location.
Initial three-year phase A work will focus on reprocessing legacy 3D seismic data to improve reservoir imaging and refine the structural model to de-risk the Blackadder structure at “nominal cost”.
“The Blackadder project has many analogous attributes to the Selene prospect, where the reworking of legacy datasets has unearthed a potential missed pay opportunity of material scale,” said chief executive Graham Swindells.
“Blackadder’s location, in close proximity to existing infrastructure that requires new third party gas to defer decommissioning, should enhance its value in a mature basin where new licences are likely to become increasingly scarce.
“Over the coming year we will progress our work on the legacy data in preparation for farm-out, in anticipation of drilling an appraisal well on Blackadder in due course.”