Maersk Oil has said it has made a step towards building a “significant business” offshore Angola after striking pre-salt oil.
The firm and its partners declared the Azul-1 deepwater exploration well – the first to penetrate pre-salt objectives in Angolan deepwater – was a discovery well having recovered two “good quality oil samples”.
Preliminary work on data from the well, in Block 23 in the Kwanza Basin, showed potential flow rates of more than 3,000 barrels of oil a day, Maersk said.
Lars Nydahl Jorgensen, head of exploration at Maersk, said: “The result may be a further step towards our goal of building up a significant business in Angola.
“There is substantial evaluation work ahead of us to determine whether the discovery is enough to invest further to get production going.
“This will be done by, amongst other things, state of the art reprocessing of seismic data. Fully appraising the discovery will take several years and it is far too early to guess the outcome.”
Maersk said it would carry out further evaluation on the discovery well results and would do more exploration work in the block.
Maersk Oil is operator of Block 23 with a 50% working interest with partners Svenska (30%) and Sonangol P&P (20%).