Canadian oil and gas company Ithaca Energy said yesterday it had raised another £100million to help accelerate development of the Greater Stella Area in the UK central North Sea.
The firm said the money raised from the share placings, together with a £91million loan from the Bank of Scotland plus anticipated cash flows meant all current projects were anticipated to be fully funded through to first production.
The Greater Stella Area (GSA) includes the Stella, Harrier and Hurricane discoveries.
Ithaca said GSA had now become a focus for the company to accelerate return on investment through co-development of the discoveries.
Central to the project is the joint development of the Stella and Harrier fields, with first oil and gas targeted for late 2012.
Options include a subsea tieback to existing infrastructure or using a floating production vessel.
Appraisal work is still going on at the Hurricane find.
Ithaca said GSA accounted for more than 70% of its proved plus probable reserves of nearly 42million barrels of oil equivalent.
Earlier this week, Ithaca said it was on target to achieve its forecast production target for this year.
This was thanks to a strong performance from the Beatrice field after an outage in the first quarter and higher than expected output from the nearby Jacky field.
It said production averaged 10,217 barrels of oil per day (bopd) during the second quarter, 4,914 net to Ithaca, with the figure for June averaging 10,678bopd, 5,124 net to Ithaca – a 17% improvement on the first quarter this year.