OMV strikes oil in Norwegian North Sea

OMV Norge, a subsidiary of Austria’s oil and gas company OMV, has made an oil discovery near the Gudurun field in the Norwegian part of the North Sea.

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) reported today, 20 April, that OMV Norge, operator of the production license 817, had completed the drilling of wildcat well 15/2-2 S using Odfjell Drilling’s Deepsea Yantai.

The well was drilled about 5 kilometers west of the Gudrun field and about 230 kilometers west of Stavanger, at a water depth of 111 meters. It was drilled to a vertical depth of 4,723 meters below sea level and was terminated in the Draupne Formation in the Upper Jurassic.

“Well 15/2-2 S encountered a 500-metre-thick oil column in the intra-Draupne Formation, consisting of multiple thin sandstone layers totalling 23 metres with poor reservoir properties,” NPD reported.

According to NPD, the objective of the well was to prove petroleum in reservoir rocks in the intra-Draupne Formation from the Upper Jurassic. The well will now be permanently plugged and abandoned.

The preliminary estimate of the size of the discovery is between 0.95 – 5.55 million standard cubic meters (Sm3) of recoverable oil equivalent. The licensees will evaluate the well result to define the volume potential in different reservoir zones and will assess the discovery alongside other prospects in the production license.

The well was not formation-tested, but data acquisition and sampling were undertaken. This is the first exploration well in production license 817, which was awarded on 5 February 2016 and is valid until 5 February 2026.

OMV Norge is the operator with an ownership interest of 50 per cent, while other licensees are Neptune Energy (30 per cent) and Source Energy (20 per cent).

OMV Norge hired the Deepsea Yantai semi-submersible rig in September 2022 for drilling operations in the North Sea, which include one firm well “Eirik” in PL 817, plus one optional well in 2023 or 2024.

On 17 January, the NPD announced it had granted the company a drilling permit for the wells 15/2-2 S and 15/2-2 A. A week later, OMV Norge received consent from the Petroleum Safety Authority Norway (PSA) for exploration drilling in block 15/2 for the well 15/2-2 S.

According to NPD, Deepsea Yantai is now moving on to production license 1148 in the North Sea, where Wellesley Petroleum is the operator.