Equinor has said its Lifjellet prospect in the Central North Sea could be the “one to watch” from its UK exploration campaign.
Four of the five wells the firm planned for 2019 have been drilled so far, with the majority carried out by Seadrill’s West Phoenix rig.
Equinor is partnered with Shell on Lifjellet, the final prospect, which lies near the median line with Norway.
UK North Sea boss, Hedda Felin, said: “We’ve drilled four wells and have one more to come In Lifjellet, which could be one to watch.”
Other wells have included an appraisal on the Verbier discovery in the Moray Firth, the Bigfoot and Pip prospects with partner BP.
Meanwhile Eni’s Rowallan prospect, which Equinor holds an 8% stake in and was drilled with the Ensco 121 jack-up rig, came up dry.
Verbier encountered around 25million barrels of oil equivalent, which was lower than the 130million which had been hoped for.
However Ms Felin said the firm is “not finished yet” with the prospect.
She said: “As a reservoir we were hoping that volumes would be bigger but we are not totally finished with Verbier yet.
“That decision will be taken with our partners. Will we do more in that area? We will analyse. I have to leave that to my geologists to really analyse what they have and then we will decide what we will do with that area.”
Bigfoot and Pip have not been major discoveries, according to Ms Felin, who said “that is the nature of exploration”.
She said: “It’s been about really testing new areas. So with quite high risk the results haven’t been major discoveries so far but it has given us a lot of information that has been very useful. Then we still have one more well to come and we were successful in the last licencing round.
“We still want to test out new areas and we will evaluate in the coming year how Rosebank might have an impact on our exploration programme going forward.”
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