Vår Energi and its partner Equinor have made a gas and condensate discovery at the Lakris prospect in the Gimsan Basin on the Halten Terrace in the Norwegian Sea.
Preliminary estimates place recoverable resources at between 200,000 and 900,000 standard cubic metres of oil equivalent, or 1.3–5.5 million barrels of oil equivalent.
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The discovery was made by wildcat well 6407/5-3 S, drilled around 170km north-west of Kristiansund.
Vår Energi operates production licence 1002, with Equinor as partner. The licence was awarded through APA 2018 on 1 March 2019 and the Lakris well was its first exploration well.
The COSL Prospector rig drilled the well to a vertical depth of 4,225m below sea level.
Operations ended in Lower Jurassic strata, with the water depth at the location measured at 218m. The well is due to be permanently plugged and abandoned.
The drilling programme targeted potential petroleum accumulations in Cretaceous rocks of the Nise Formation and Lower Jurassic rocks of the Tilje Formation.
The well encountered gas and condensate in the upper Tilje Formation, within 54m of heterolithic reservoir rock.
Reservoir quality in that section was described as moderate to poor, while the gas-water contact was not reached. The lower part of the Tilje Formation showed hydrocarbons, although no further detail was provided on the extent of those shows.
The well did not find a sandstone reservoir in the Nise Formation.
However, elevated gas readings were recorded in that interval. Drilling also assessed the Garn, Ile and Tofte formations, where the intervals contained water and reservoir quality ranged from moderate to poor.
No formation test was conducted, although the companies obtained data and samples from the well.
The Gimsan Basin lies on the mid-Norwegian Continental Shelf, around 240km north-west of Trondheim. It is located on the Halten Terrace, in an area associated with the Mikkel and Heidrun fields.
In April this year, Vår Energi and its partner Equinor submitted a revised plan for the development and operation of the Goliat Gas Export project to the Norwegian Ministry of Energy.
