Norway’s state-owned energy giant Equinor has made a new oil find on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), putting on the table a potential tie-back to the country’s largest oil development ever brought on stream in the Barents Sea.
Equinor and its partners have made an oil discovery in the Skrugard North Tubåen prospect in the Barents Sea, thanks to the 7220/5-EC-2 H wildcat well, which was drilled by the Transocean Enabler rig around 6 kilometers north of the 7220/8-1 discovery well on the Johan Castberg field and 240 kilometers northwest of Hammerfest.
This is the 17th exploration well in production licence 532 , which was awarded in the 20th licensing round on the Norwegian Continental Shelf in 2009. The licensees in the production licence are Equinor (operator), Vår Energi, and Petoro. The objective of the well was to prove petroleum in Lower Jurassic reservoir rocks in the Tubåen Formation.
The well 7220/5-EC-2 H encountered an approximately 30-meter oil column in sandstone in the Tubåen Formation in reservoir rocks totalling 41 meters, with good to very good reservoir quality. The total thickness of the Tubåen Formation is 68 meters. The oil/water contact was encountered at 1,474 meters below sea level.
The well, which was drilled to a vertical depth of 1,521 meters below sea level and terminated in the Fruholmen Formation in the Upper Triassic, was not formation-tested, but data and samples have been collected. The water depth at the site is 361 meters. The well will now be permanently plugged and abandoned.
According to the Norwegian Offshore Directorate, preliminary estimates indicate the discovery’s size is between 1.2-1.7 million standard cubic meters of recoverable oil equivalent (o.e.), which corresponds to 7.6-10.5 million barrels of o.e. The licensees are considering whether it may be possible to tie the field back to the Johan Castberg field.
This oil discovery comes months after Equinor made another one in the Polynya Tubåen prospect, also known as the 7220/7-5 well, further strengthening the development of Johan Castberg, as it would be tied into the Barents Sea field.