Home :: Sitemap :: Contact

Northern Petroleum Plc

Northern Petroleum Plc is an EU oil company that acquires low entry cost exploration, production and development assets and is committed to adding high value to shareholders from production and asset sales.

Drilling update - Isle of Wight

6.05.04

Northern Petroleum Plc announces that its wholly owned subsidiary, Northern Petroleum (GB) Limited (“Northern” or “the Company”), has purchased a 4.2 acre site on the Isle of Wight and submitted an application for a grant of planning permission to drill the Sandhills-2 well to test a logged oil column in the Jurassic Great Oolite formation encountered in a British Gas well drilled in 1982. The information has been assessed by a firm of independent geological consultants and determined as being in ‘probable’ and ‘possible’ reserve categories.

Northern is also planning to side-track and deepen the well to test a mapped target in the Triassic Sherwood Sandstone formation, which is highly productive, at the BP operated Wytch Farm oil field near Poole.

Derek Musgrove, Managing Director commented,

“This project has been the result of two years extensive study. Northern is fortunate in probably being the first company to have access to an almost complete seismic and well database acquired individually by major and junior oil companies during the period 1980-1992. Our detailed regional study has resulted in new understandings of both sedimentation and structural movements within our considerable licence area. The result has been the delineation of several Triassic prospects of considerable interest with the potential to realise significant value from the region. Sandhills-2 is one of them.

The Company has also taken a considerable number of environmental factors into account before selecting this site near Porchfield”.

Licence History, Exploration Activity and Geology

Northern Petroleum (GB) Ltd, as operator of PEDL 098, has evaluated the licence area, together with PEDLs 089 and 113, on the Isle of Wight. The geological and geophysical evaluation of the acreage has highlighted the potential of some oil indications encountered within the Great Oolite formation of the Middle Jurassic when British Gas drilled the Sandhills #1 exploration well in 1982 near Porchfield. This exploration well was targeted at the Sherwood sandstone, a deeper formation that is productive at the Wytch Farm oilfield in Dorset, but which was water wet in Sandhills #1 and the oil in the Great Oolite was not considered significant at the time of drilling. Northern Petroleum wish to drill an exploratory borehole to evaluate the oil shows and test the well to establish if the Great Oolite formation is capable of producing oil in commercial quantities and drill a separate target location for the Sherwood sandstone to that drilled at Sandhills #1 .

In order to carry out this evaluation, permission is now sought from the Isle of Wight County Council to construct a site and drill an exploratory borehole, with a target depth of about 1,600 metres.

More information about Northern's UK operations can be found here.

For further information please contact:

Graham Heard/Gillian Hunt
Northern Petroleum Plc
Tel 020 7743 6080

Chris Roberts/Ben Simons
Hansard Communications
Tel. 020 7245 1100
     

Register for email updates: