Tullow Oil to leave two wells which fail to produce

Tullow Oil will abandon offshore wells in Suriname and Norway after it failed to find any oil or gas.

The company will plug and leave the Spari-1 well in Suriname and the Salander hole in Norway, it said in a statement Wednesday.

Tullow has a 30 per cent share in the South American well and 25 per cent in the Norwegian concession that’s operated by E.ON E and P Norge, it said.

“No significant hydrocarbon shows were encountered” at Spari-1, Tullow said.

“The Salander well in offshore PL 650 found sandstones with good reservoir properties but no hydrocarbons were encountered at this location.”

Tullow, which has made some of Africa’s largest oil discoveries in the past 10 years, said in June it failed to find hydrocarbons in another well called Zumba in the Norwegian Sea.

The company resumed gas exports and raised oil output from its Jubilee field off the coast of Ghana after completing repairs to a damaged floating production vessel that cut production a month ago.

Tullow started exports of 100 million cubic feet a day of gas from the field and also raised oil production to levels before the shutdown, it said.

Exports from Jubilee, its largest producing field, were halted on July 3rd after a gas compression problem on the production vessel. The stoppage came just days after the company raised its 2015 output forecast to as much as 70,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, citing a strong performance from West African deposits.

Production had dropped to 65,000 barrels a day following the gas compressor shutdown.

"With production back to normal at Jubilee, we expect to meet our full-year production guidance," chief executive Aidan Heavey said in the statement.

“We are also focused on operational efficiency and the Jubilee compressor issue has been resolved ahead of schedule.”

Deliveries to Jubilee’s onshore processing facility averaged about 80 million cubic feet a day of gas since it was commissioned in March.

- Bloomberg