Irish oil and gas company Providence Resources has started a well site survey over the block containing its undeveloped Barryroe oil and gas field in the North Celtic Sea Basin, located c. 50km off the south coast of Ireland.
"Providence is pleased to confirm that the Marine Institute’s Celtic Voyager survey vessel mobilized on 24 October to the Barryroe field where it will undertake a seabed, shallow geophysical and environmental baseline survey over the K area of the Barryroe field. The site survey is expected to take up to 7 days depending on operating conditions," Providence said Tuesday.
James Menton, Executive Chairman, commented “The Directors of Providence Resources believe that we have a compelling proposition with regards to the Barryroe prospect. We continue to focus on moving ahead with this project in these challenging times of energy supply and security.”
A week ago, Providence CEO Alan Linn stepped down from his position to devote more time to his other business interests.
He said last week that following the recent strategic decision by the Providence Board to take the management and financing of the Barryroe project in-house, he felt it was " the opportune time to hand over to new leadership."
While Providence is searching for a new Chief Executive Officer. In the intervening period, James Menton has been named Executive Chairman.
Barryroe, located in the North Celtic Sea offshore Ireland, and dubbed one of the largest undeveloped oil and gas discoveries offshore Europe, is estimated to hold 2C resources of independently audited at 346 MMBOE gross.
Providence Resources in April terminated the farm-out agreement with Norwegian firm SpotOn Energy for the offshore block in Ireland containing the Barryroe oil and gas discovery.
Providence, with its partner Lansdowne, had in November 2020 agreed to farm out a 50% working interest Barryroe field to SpotOn, months after it started the farm-out talks.
SpotOn was to become the operator of the block and was expected, with its consortium of leading oilfield services providers including Schlumberger, Maersk Drilling, Keppel FELS, and Aker Solutions, Aibel, and AGR, to fund 100% of the early development program costs and the full field development.
However, Providence in April terminated the farm-out deal with SpotOn because "key financing conditions were not met," and said it would "lead the project development and funding arrangements."
Providence has previously said that Barryroe would be developed in phases, with an early development scheme for Barryroe planned to include three production wells with horizontal completions into the A-sand reservoir; one water injection well into the A-sand reservoir; subsea production trees with manifold and umbilicals tied back to a leased FPSO.