Statoil Korpfjell prospect located 260 miles north of mainland Norway
By Gwladys Fouche
STAVANGER, Norway, Aug 30 (Reuters) – Oil firm Statoil will drill Norway’s northernmost oil well next year in the Barents Sea, where it believes a significant oil discovery can be made, an executive said on Tuesday.
The company will drill the Korpfjell prospect 418 km (260 miles) north of mainland Norway next year as part of its exploration campaign in the Norwegian Arctic in 2017.
“It is a high-impact well,” Statoil‘s head of exploration, Tim Dodson, told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil conference in Stavanger, Norway.
Statoil defines a high-impact well as one that has the potential to provide a total of more than 250 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe) to Statoil and any partners, or 100 million boe net to the company alone.
Overall, Statoil will drill up to seven wells in the Norwegian Arctic next year and Dodson said two other prospects – Koigen Central and Gemini North – were also expected to be high-impact wells.
“We believe there are good prospects of finding oil in Korpfjell,” Dodson earlier told a news conference.
The firm’s Arctic prospects are spread out across the Barents Sea so they can test different geological structures for oil and gas deposits.
Unlike other Arctic regions, the part of the Barents Sea where oil companies can drill is free of ice and as shallow as the North Sea.
(Editing by David Clarke)
