LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Britain, Ireland and Morocco-focussed energy company Europa Oil & Gas announced on Wednesday that its wholly-owned subsidiary operator of the West Firsby oilfield has entered into a memorandum of understanding with Causeway Geothermal, to assess the potential of the field as a geothermal test and commercial deployment site.
The AIM-traded firm said the memorandum paved the way to use existing infrastructure and wells for the testing of geothermal solutions at West Firsby, with the aim of developing, evaluating and refining elements of CausewayGT's "clean, sustainable" technology, while also assessing the potential delivery of "clean, reliable, and cheap" sources of heat from West Frisby.

It said the memorandum was in line with its objective to participate actively in the national energy transition.

The board described West Firsby as an "excellent opportunity" to evaluate, test and prove different technical aspects of CausewayGT's geothermal systems.

Located in the East Midlands, West Firsby is late in its productive life, with nine wellbores and seven wellheads.

The wellbores extend over an area of 2.5 square kilometres, and to a depth of 1,680 metres.

Europa said the existing wellbores, together with the availability of data collected over the last 34 years and the geothermal gradient, made West Firsby "one of the best candidates" in the UK for testing geothermal solutions.

It said CausewayGT would apply its "extensive" geology and reservoir engineering experience to further develop its geothermal systems with West Firsby as test location.

The memorandum of understanding was centred on implementing desktop studies and test designs to assess the potential of West Firsby as a test site.

Over an expected two-year period, the teams at CausewayGT and Europa would further analyse the West Firsby dataset, including rock properties, temperature data and well data.

Part of the work would also assess West Firsby's potential for the commercial deployment of geothermal at the site.

"Teaming up with CausewayGT to evaluate the conversion of onshore legacy oilfields, such as West Firsby, into 100% clean, reliable, and cheap sources of electricity and heat by harnessing geothermal energy demonstrates our ambition to make a positive contribution to the ongoing energy transition," said chief executive officer Simon Oddie.

"Not only do we believe that the geology, dataset, and infrastructure at West Firsby make the field an ideal candidate for testing, but also that the expertise and skill set the Europa team have built up over decades of operating UK onshore fields are easily transferable to exploiting this clean source of energy.

"Europa can therefore play a key role in proving the viability of generating clean energy and heat from legacy oil fields and in the process advancing the geothermal industry in the UK."

At 1125 BST, shares in Europa Oil & Gas Holdings were up 1.62% at 1.25p.

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