Norway's Statoil announced a "high-impact oil discovery" in the North Sea, suggesting the area may have more life left than generally assumed after 40 years of drilling. "The North Sea is quite a basin - it never stops delivering," Statoil's senior vice president for exploration, Gro Haatvedt, told Reuters on Monday.
"This may not be an elephant field, but on an international scale it is a significant discovery." She put the size of the prospect, called Aldous Major South, at 200 million to 400 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe) and said it seems to be part of a wider zone containing lots more oil, some controlled by Sweden's Lundin Petroleum. She compared the importance of the discovery to that of the Norne field in the Norwegian Sea in 1997, which is still producing 34,000 barrels of oil per day, and the Skrugard prospect earlier this year in the Barents Sea.