88 Energy Ltd (LON:88E) is only “a few short weeks away” from restarting operations at the Icewine-2 well, managing director Dave Wall told Proactive Investors.
Wall said the previously completed fracking programme had gone very well - in fact better-than-expected - however, the programme did run into some difficulties when it came to testing – and investors will be looking to the upcoming resumption and hoping for better results.
“We did get caught out in terms of timing,” the 88 Energy managing director said in an interview with Andrew Scott.
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“We ended up having to shut the well in for the cold arctic winter because we hadn’t finished flowing back the required amount of fluid that we needed to from the reservoir.
“Of course, this is fluid that we injected into the reservoir [through the fracking programme].
“The plan is, in early June, we will recommence the flow back, we’ll use nitrogen lift to accelerate the rate at which we can draw fluid from the reservoir and then hopefully - and all indications suggest that this should happen – we’ll get hydrocarbons flow.
“And what happens after that will depend on how high the rate of flow we can achieve.”
Wall added: “Internally and externally we’ve given our expectation that 100 barrels of oil per day is the yardstick where we’d measure success.”
The 88 Energy boss also talked about the possibility of a partnership deal for the shale, albeit he said that any deal would depend upon the outcome of testing operations and future work.
“What we always say is that we’ll do the best thing for creating wealth for our shareholders, so [we’ll do] whatever is accretive.
“One of the things we’ve also been communicating and guiding in recent months is that we have spent a lot of shareholders' money on this project, Project Icewine, and predominantly in relation to the HRZ [shale discovery], but, also on the conventional.
“We think that it is appropriate that we start to validate the value that we’ve created, by bringing in a third party to help bring the project forward and also underpin the valuation of the company by having a ‘look through’ transaction which will show that someone else from industry also agrees that we’ve created significant value.”
In the full interview Wall also discusses the 3D seismic programme, which was completed in April, and the role the new data will play in the group’s ambitions to explore for conventional oil targets in the Project Icewine and surrounding areas.
