Edison Investment Research

Kosmos exploration hiccups

Kosmos this week announced that its most recent exploration well offshore Mauritania, Lamantin-1, was water bearing.

The well is the second disappointment in a four well exploration campaign offshore Mauritania and Senegal designed to test the outboard basin floor fan fairway. Since its Tortue-1 discovery in 2015, the company had enjoyed a 100% success rate in the region, with 25 Tcf discovered across five wells.

Verbier delivers after sidetrack

Statoil’s sidetracked Verbier well has discovered oil after the main wellbore found water filled sand. The company was targeting oil in an updip location on the structure together with joint venture partner Jersey Oil & Gas (JOG). Statoil believes that the 20/05b-13z well has proven a minimum recoverable resource of 25mmbbls, and that the upside could be as much as 130mmbbls. The JV has not at this stage provided details of the discovery such as sand quality and thickness, or of the location of the sidetrack. Appraisal wells will now be planned to assess the commerciality of Verbier, and to mature further prospectivity in the P2170 licence including the Cortina prospect and Meribel lead.

EnQuest acquisition: Ability to extract net economics (NAV) will be demonstrated over time

EnQuest’s agreement to take over operatorship of Magnus, SVT and associated infrastructure is a material operational undertaking, especially when considered in parallel with commissioning and ramp-up of production at Kraken. The transaction will involve EnQuest taking on several hundred onshore and offshore staff and contractors. With this in mind, EnQuest’s staged approach, which involves taking on just 25% of Magnus and an additional 3% of SVT at the outset, appears to be sensible. The combination of deferred consideration payments, a ‘call’ option on additional equity in the transaction assets and downside protection mechanisms suggest that EnQuest is backing its ability to maximise value from late-life assets without exposing shareholders to potential downsides. EnQuest has until 15 January 2019 to exercise its option over an additional 75% of Magnus and related transaction assets, giving it time to understand the operational complexities as well as study decommissioning options before taking on risk. 

Five themes from oil majors’ 2015 updates

This post is an excerpt from the latest edition of our Catalytic Converter monthly (link), published on 25 February 2015.

As the Big Oil year-end 2014 reporting season draws to an end, we reflect on the main messages from the strategy updates.