Deltic Energy has announced that it has accepted one of the two licences that were provisionally awarded by the North Sea Transition Authority in Tranche 3 of the UK's 33rd Offshore Licensing Round.
Licence P2672 (Deltic 100% WI) is located immediately to the west of the West Sole gas field and covers blocks 47/5e, 47/10c and 48/6c and contains the Pharos and Teviot discoveries. Deltic's preliminary evaluation, completed as part of the application process, has resulted in an updated understanding of the structural setting, which suggests that the Pharos discovery and the Blackadder prospect are in fact a single Leman Sandstone structure.
The 47/05d-6 well, drilled by a consortium led by Dana Petroleum in 2013, targeted what was originally interpreted to be a standalone prospect formerly called Pharos, however updated structural mapping indicates the well intersected the materially larger Blackadder structure in a downdip location.
The initial 3 year Phase A work programme commitments for the licence are focused on the reprocessing of legacy 3D seismic data to improve reservoir imaging and refine the structural model in order to further de-risk the Blackadder structure at nominal cost.
Graham Swindells, CEO of Deltic, commented: "The Blackadder project has many analogous attributes to the Selene prospect, where the reworking of legacy datasets has unearthed a potential missed pay opportunity of material scale. Blackadder's location, in close proximity to existing infrastructure that requires new third party gas to defer decommissioning, should enhance its value in a mature basin where new licences are likely to become increasingly scarce. Over the coming year we will progress our work on the legacy data in preparation for farm-out, in anticipation of drilling an appraisal well on Blackadder in due course."