Panoro Energy will drill a production well in Tunisia in May, while three workovers are under way and should be on line by the end of March.
The Oslo-listed company will carry out the work on licences bought in late 2018, via Thyna Production Services (TPS). The drilling will be the first carried out on the area since 2015.
The well will be drilled on the Guebiba onshore field, using the CTF 06 rig, owned by Tunisia’s state-owned Compagnie Tunisienne de Forage (CTF). The plan is to use an existing top hole, targeting a new interval on the Bireno formation at 3,600 metres. The field is close to Sfax.
Drilling this well is required to tap the western section of the field, it said, and should significantly increase output from the TPS assets.
Panoro’s CEO John Hamilton said the well on the Guebiba field would be used ahead of its planned Salloum West exploration well. “Our Tunisian assets are undergoing an unprecedented high level of activity and we expect this to yield results in material additional production during the first half of 2020,” Hamilton said.
The Salloum West has been delayed because of the regulatory approval process. It should follow the Guebiba well immediately. The Salloum West follows a well drilled in 1992, which tested the Bireno formation at 1,846 barrels per day. Panoro has said the plan would be for the well to begin producing immediately, as an extended well test, with oil going to the Rhemoura production facility.
Three workovers should be completed and producing in stages by the end of the first quarter, with the aim of increasing production from the TPS assets to around 5,000 bpd. Workovers have upped output from 3,450 bpd in the third quarter to more than 4,000 bpd.
Panoro holds a net 29.4% stake in the five concessions that make up the TPS assets. Entreprise Tunisienne d’Activités Pétrolières (ETAP) holds the remaining 51%. When the company bought the licences, production was around 4,000 bpd.