Companies set to act quickly after North Sea licensing round

The latest offshore licensing round shows exploration is still “alive” in the North Sea, the industry’s regulator said yesterday.

The Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) has agreed to dish out 123 licences over 229 blocks or part-blocks to 61 companies in the 30th offshore auction.

A total of 813 blocks or part blocks in the southern, central and northern North Sea, west of Shetland and the East Irish Sea were put up for grabs when the licensing round was launched in July 2017.

Some of the areas were last made available more than 40 years ago and a large number of prospects and undeveloped discoveries were included.

OGA expects companies to act on the awards “very quickly”, providing a much needed boost to exploration. Some 14 of the licences will immediately be advanced to the field development planning stage.

New work programme commitments also include eight firm exploration or appraisal wells and nine firm new-shoot 3D seismic surveys.

OGA hopes the round will unlock 320 million barrels of oil in undeveloped oil and gas discoveries which were previously “stranded”. Around 3.6 billion barrels worth of exploration prospectivity will be progressed by the new licensees.

Total, Siccar Point, BP, Chrysaor, Shell and Parkmead all picked up licences west of Shetland, while Equinor, Apache, Ithaca and Dana Petroleum were among the winners in the northern North Sea.

Many of those companies also swooped for acreage in the central North Sea, where Cluff Natural Resources, Chevron, i3 Energy and Zennor Petroleum were active.