LONDON (ShareCast) - (ShareCast News) - UK and Ireland-focussed oil and gas exploration, development and production company Europa Oil & Gas announced the results of an independent competent person's report on Monday, prepared by ERC Equipoise, including estimates of gross mean unrisked prospective resources of 553 mmboe across two new pre-rift prospects, Ervine and Edgeworth, in licensing option 16/2, offshore Atlantic Ireland.
The AIM-traded firm confirmed it has a 100% interest in LO 16/2 which is located in the South Porcupine Basin.

It said the CPR followed in-house work conducted on proprietary 3D seismic data, which identified a number of large pre-rift tilted fault blocks, potentially analogous to the Brent Province of the North Sea.

ERCE independently assessed the prospective resources associated with two of those fault blocks, the Edgeworth and Ervine prospects, and assigned gross mean unrisked prospective resources of 251 mmboe and 302 mmboe respectively.

Both prospects awee above the 200 mmboe threshold considered by Europa to be the minimum economic field size.

Together with three Cretaceous fan prospects on Europa's 100% owned Frontier Exploration Licence 3/13, which adjoined LO 16/2, ERCE had audited more than two billion boe of gross mean unrisked prospective resources across five prospects - Wilde, Beckett and Shaw in FEL 3/13 and Edgeworth and Ervine in LO 16/2.

That brought Europa's total aggregated gross mean unrisked prospective resources across its seven Irish Atlantic margin licences to 4.7 billion boe and 1.5 tcf of gas, using the company's internal estimates for FEL 2/13, LO 16/19, LO 16/20, LO16/21 and LO 16/22, the board said.

"The potential resources on these two licences are very large and diversified in terms of play type," explained CEO Hugh Mackay.

"We believe that Atlantic Ireland is about to enter a phase of exploration drilling starting this summer.

"Portfolio diversity should enable us to profit from the read across from other companies' success, whichever play it comes from."

Mackay said the company's target for future work on the prospects in LO 16/2 was to undertake a programme of 3D reprocessing to further de-risk the prospects and mature them to drillable prospect status.

"In parallel with this we have an active farm-out programme underway for our industry leading licence position offshore Atlantic Ireland which includes LO 16/2.

"This is an exciting time for Europa and I look forward to updating the market on our progress."

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