Spirit Energy has failed to find hydrocarbons at a Barents Sea exploration well in the production license 719, offshore Norway.
The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate said Monday morning that Spirit Energy had concluded the drilling of wildcat well 7321/8-2 S and that the well was dry.
The well was drilled about 110 kilometers north of the Johan Castberg field and about 310 kilometers north of Hammerfest.
The primary exploration target for the well was to prove petroleum in Middle Jurassic to Upper Triassic reservoir rocks (the Stø, Fruholmen and Snadd Formations). The secondary exploration target was data acquisition to improve the understanding of potential reservoir rocks in the Lower Cretaceous (the Kolje Formation).
In the primary exploration target, the well encountered the Stø Formation with a thickness of about 30 meters, with water-bearing sandstone layers of 20 metres, mainly with moderate reservoir quality. The Fruholmen Formation was about 120 meters thick, with several water-bearing sandstone layers in the upper part of the formation, totaling 30 meters, mainly with moderate to poor reservoir quality.
About 80 meters of the upper part of the Snadd Formation was drilled, but the only thing encountered was a water-bearing sandstone layer, 2 meters thick, and with good reservoir quality.
The secondary exploration target encountered traces of petroleum in silt/fine sands in the Lower Cretaceous (the Kolje Formation). The well is classified as dry.
This is the first exploration well in production licence 719. The licence was awarded in the 22nd licensing round in 2013.
Well 7321/8-2 S was drilled to a measured depth of 1874 metres and a vertical depth of 1777 meters below sea level, and it was terminated in the Snadd Formation in the Upper Triassic.
Water depth at the site is 466 meters. The well has been permanently plugged and abandoned.
The well was drilled by the Leiv Eiriksson semi-submersible drilling rig. The Transocean-owned rig will now move to drill the wildcat well 16/1-33 S in production license 780 in the North Sea, where Spirit Energy Norway AS is the operator.