As Europa Oil & Gas Holdings Plc (LON:EOG) today officially kicks off a data room for its farm-out efforts, the AIM-quoted explorer has added another big potential exploration programme offshore Ireland.
The prospect, called Egerton, is described as being analogous to the Bay du Nord discovery, off the Canadian coast - in a similar geological setting, in the ‘conjugate’ on the other side of the Atlantic.
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Additionally, the frontier exploration licence (FEL 1/17) hosting Egerton also contains the Ervine prospect. Together, the FEL 1/17 licences are now estimated to contain some 584mln barrels of oil equivalent.
It comes as a result of the reprocessing of proprietary 3D seismic data.
Hugh Mackay, Europa chief executive, told investors that the reprocessing exercise had “transformed the prospect inventory”.
“Prospect volumes have changed, but more importantly the accuracy of our maps and our confidence in them, has substantially increased,” Mackay said.
“Our prospects are tightened up and de-risked. We now have firm drilling targets with clearly positive economics on each licence.”
Drill ready, subject to farm-out
Europa also highlighted that a separate licence, FEL 2/13, host three prospects – Kiely East, Kiely West and Kilroy – which are seen to have 817mln boe of prospective resources.
The company’s prospect inventory comprises three ‘drill ready’ opportunities (namely Kiely East, Wilde and Edgeworth).
Mackay added: “We promised half a dozen drillable prospects by the end of 2018, now we have four, three here in the Porcupine and one in the Slyne.
“Subject to regulatory approval we will be able to proceed to FEL Phase 2 on each licence with confidence, and we now believe we have the data to convince substantive farminees of the compelling case to take these four licences forward towards drilling with the first well targeted for mid-2019 on the Inishkea prospects in the Slyne licence LO 16/20, subject to funding.”