Cairn 'Excited' by Senegal

Cairn Energy CEO Simon Thomson told shareholders at its annual general meeting (AGM), held in Scotland on May 12, that: "Senegal is a very significant and exciting part of the portfolio and we are delighted with the results to date of the multi-well evaluation programme, which has confirmed the scale and potential of this world class asset.” More resource estimates would be announced in August, he said.

Of Cairn’s five successful wells there over the past 18 months, he said: “Operations in Senegal are ahead of schedule and substantially under budget. The three-year evaluation period approved at the beginning of the year by the government of Senegal allows the joint venture sufficient time to properly appraise the SNE discovery and to pursue further exploration on the block.”

In March, following the results of the discovery well and first appraisal well, SNE-2, Cairn upgraded its 1C contingent resource assessment by 30% to 200mn bbls and its 2C resources to 385mn bbl.

“We plan to make further resource revisions at our half-year results in August, which will take into account full analysis of results from the SNE-3, BEL-1 [Bellatrix] and SNE-4 wells,” Thomson told the AGM.

Speaking a month ago, so a month after BEL-1 had spudded in March, Cairn's exploration director Richard Heaton had said Bellatrix "could be a mix of gas and oil, just all one.”

Mark Smedley