Equinor makes sixth oil & gas discovery in North Sea well

Norwegian state-owned energy giant Equinor has made a sixth hydrocarbon discovery in the Kveikje exploration well, located in the North Sea offshore Norway, the company said on Monday.

Based on preliminary estimates, the size of the discovery close to the Troll and Fram area is between 4 and 8 million standard cubic metres of recoverable oil equivalent, or 25-50 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalent, the company said.

Equinor is the operator of production licence 293 B, with the licence ownership split across Equinor (51 percent), DNO (29 percent), Idemitsu (10 percent) and Longboat Energy (10 percent).

This is the sixth discovery in this area since the autumn of 2019, and more than 300 million barrels of oil equivalent were proven in the five former discoveries.

“We are very pleased to make another discovery in this area that we regard to be commercial. As we did with the other discoveries in this area, we will consider tying this discovery to the Troll B or C platform,” Lill H. Brusdal, Equinor’s vice president for the Troll area, said in a statement.

“By utilising the existing infrastructure, we will be able to recover these volumes at a low cost and with low emissions,” she added.

The well was drilled by Deepsea Stavanger, and Equinor plans to drill another exploration well in this area this year.

Last month, a top Equinor executive said the company was looking at further options to increase gas production from the fields after receiving a permit to produce more from the Oseberg, Troll and Heidrun fields.

“We are looking into several other options... We are sitting down together with the various license holders, with the government and (gas system operator) Gassco to see if there are other options," Equinor’s head of Norwegian operations, Kjetil Hove, told Reuters in an interview last month.