Equinor's Appraisal Well Drilling Fails As It Encounters Water

Equinor ASA (NYSE:EQNR) recently announced completing the drilling activity of an appraisal well near North Sea’s Fram field.

The preliminary exploration work, which led to a well holding water, was devised to examine the discovery in the primary exploration target and to determine the ratio between oil and gas.

This new discovery was expected to contain between 6 million and 16 million standard cubic meters of recoverable oil equivalent.

The drilling of the exploration well 35/11-23 A in production licence (PL) 090 covered more than 3 kilometres to the south-west of the Fram field in the northern part of the North Sea and 120 kilometres north-west of Bergen.

The well, now permanently plugged and abandoned, is the 17th exploration well in production license 090, which was granted in the 8th licensing round in 1984.

Equinor is currently the operator of production license 090 with 45% stake, the remainder being held by a consortium of Norwegian subsidiaries of ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) , Idemitsu Petroleum and Neptune Energy.

The well drilled by the Deepsea Atlantic drilling rig was bored to a vertical depth of 2629 meters and 2853 meters deep down the sea level and was finished in the Viking Group in the Upper-Middle Jurassic. The depth of water at the site is 350 meters.

In November 2019, discovery was proven in two sandstone intervals in Upper Jurassic reservoir rocks and in the secondary exploration target in the Brent Group where both digs proved to be unproductive as the wells encountered water.

Deepsea Atlantic drilling rig is further looking forward to spud the Equinor-operated Snøhvit prospect under the production license 064 in the Barents Sea.

Zacks Rank & Key Picks

Equinor currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the energy space are Valero Energy Corporation (NYSE:VLO) and Phillips 66 (NYSE:PSX) , each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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