The Weald -- May 12, 2015

Updates

March 20, 2016: update on Horse Hill 1, near Gatwick Airport, England. 

June 5, 2015: the OIP estimate has been revised upward.

UK Oil & Gas Investments (UKOG) announced Friday that Schlumberger has estimated the gross overall oil in place (OIP) for the Jurassic section of the Horse Hill-1 well in the UK to be approximately 271 million barrels of oil per square mile.

A total of 255 million barrels gross OIP lies within the tight limestone and mudstone plays of the Kimmeridge, Oxford Clay and Lias, according to Schlumberger. Earlier this year, US petrophysical analysis firm Nutech estimated that the Horse Hill-1 well near Gatwick Airport contained a total oil in place value of 158 million barrels per square mile.

Original Post

 

Several links for this story:

• huge oil reserves found near Gatwick may not be viable
• oil discovery near Gatwick airport 'significant'
• company that discovered 100 billion bbls of oil near Gatwick admits it doesn't know how much oil is there

I've followed the story for a short time; didn't think much of it early on -- location around Gatwick Airport in southeastern England. Heavily populated; magnet for activists. But it's getting a lot of interest this week.

From Interactive Investor: huge upgrade at Horse Hill oil discovery.

Independent researchers have finished trawling through UK Oil and Gas's electric log data for the Upper Portland Sandstone at its Horse Hill oil discovery, and there's more oil in the ground than originally thought. In fact, there's an extra 12.8 million barrels. This is on top of the well-publicised upgrades made to the Kimmeridge, Oxford and Lias intervals last month, which caused the share price to rally to their highest in almost three years.

The study by consultancy Xodus suggests that there's up to 21 million barrels of stock tank oil initially in place (STOIIP) at the Upper Portland Sandstone in the Horse Hill-1 and Collendean Farm-1 wells. This is a big upgrade from the 8.2 million barrels expected in December and higher than the latest revised estimates of 20 million barrels.

Apparently there are five payzones; some/all similar to tight oil / Bakken.

The English source that said that the field may not be viable said it would be tough to extract oil, perhaps returning only 3 - 15%. In fact, that's the very same range of return in the Bakken in primary production.

To put this "huge" discovery in perspective, the Bakken probably has 500 billion bbls OOIP; at one time, some said as much as 900 billion bbls OOIP ("a trillion-bbl reservoir) with 3 to 8%, maybe more, recoverable. 

The Weald.