Greenland Minerals

Cairn Energy fails to find oil in Greenland
Company remains optimistic despite
shutdown of one of four wells
Oil and gas exploration company Cairn Energy recently announced
that it is abandoning the first well in its exploration
drilling programme offshore Greenland after failing to
find commercially viable quantities of oil.
The programme, which includes four exploration wells
offshore Greenland, is being carried out this summer and
follows on from the three-well exploration programme in
Baffin Bay basin last year.
The Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy is currently completing
plugging and abandonment operations on the LF7-1 exploration
well, located in 1,002 metres of water, approximately
300 kilometres offshore Nuuk. The well reached
target depth (TD) in basement strata where it encountered
a thick Upper Cretaceous section with tight, cemented
sandstone.
Despite this setback, the company remained optimistic:
“Although no reservoir has been found in the LF7-1
well, the first in the basin, we are encouraged by further
indications of pre-Tertiary oil-prone source rocks across
our Greenland acreage,” said managing director Simon
Thomson.
“The exploration challenge remains to find the reservoir
sands. We continue to be optimistic about the remainder
of our 2011 four-well, multi-basin exploration programme
offshore Greenland.”
Work on the AT7-1 well has also been suspended in order
to move the Leiv Eriksson rig further north and commence
operations on the Delta-1 well located at a water depth of
293 metres, approximately 100 kilometres off the Greenland
coast and 110 kilometres northeast of a well that was
drilled in 2010 with encouraging results.
The fourth well, in the Gamma prospect, is located in
1,520 metres of water and is scheduled to be drilled when
the company’s second rig, the Ocean Rig Corcovado, has
finished operations on the LF7-1.
Cairn Energy’s activities in the Arctic have received widespread
criticism and have been disrupted on several occasions
by environmentalists.
Greenpeace activists have been working to pressure Cairn
Energy into revealing its contingency plans in case of an oil
spill. According to Greenpeace, Cairn Energy has already
released large quantities of harmful chemicals into the
fragile Arctic waters, potentially posing a threat to several
endangered species of marine mammals.
Greenpeace points out that the drilling is carried out at
depths of up to 1,500 metres, which is equivalent to the
disastrous BP operations in the Gulf of Mexico. If a similar
oil spill were to take place as a consequence of Cairn
Energy’s drilling activities, they estimate that the oil would
cover most of western Greenland and large parts of the
Canadian east coast.
Cairn Energy still refuses to make its contingency plan
available to the public and has been backed by the Greenlandic
Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum. In June, Cairn
Energy won a court order against Greenpeace protesters,
barring them from coming near its rigs or offices and from
publishing any information they obtained.
By Emilie Kofoed
Oil & Minerals #2 7
CAIRN ENERGY