After a busy 2009, Petroceltic International (LON:PCI) today announced further drilling projects in Algeria, Italy and Tunisia for 2010.
Petroceltic is an independent upstream oil and gas exploration and production company focused on North Africa and the Mediterranean with headquarters in Dublin and interests in Algeria, Italy and Tunisia. Petroceltic is a publicly quoted company with shares listed on the Alternate Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange and on the Irish Enterprise Exchange (IEX) of the Irish Stock Exchange.
In Algeria, the company said an appraisal programme will commence in the second quarter of this year. Petroceltic is the operator of the Isarene permit and has a 75% working interest alongside Sonatrach, the National Oil and Gas Company of Algeria. Petroceltic completed the highly successful five well Isarene drilling and testing programme in February 2010, having discovered a major new gas condensate discovery in the Ain Tsila gas condensate field. The Company expects to retain the four discovered oil and gas fields into the next appraisal extension phase of the Isarene Permit. The appraisal programme will consist of at least two further wells on the Ain Tsila field and one well on the Isarene North Eastfield.
In Italy, Petroceltic assumed operatorship of the Elsa Discovery in January this year following the acquisition of a 30% interest from Vega Oil S.p.A, a subsidiary of Cygam Energy Inc., increasing the Company's interest to 70%. Petroceltic now plans to appraise the Elsa discovery well by drilling and testing an Elsa-2 well adjacent to the existing discovery well, Elsa-1, in which a 65m oil column was logged in 1992. Drilling operations are planned to commence in September 2010, subject to receiving all necessary regulatory approvals. Situated in 30m of water depth, some 7km offshore in the Central Adriatic region of Italy, the well will be drilled by a zero discharge jack-up rig using water-based fluids.
Finally, in Tunisia, the Company completed processing and interpretation of over over 100km of new 2D seismic in January 2010. Following interpretation of the seismic, well locations for two Ordovician prospects were selected in early February 2010. Drilling is expected to commence in June 2010 and operations are expected to continue for an estimated 12 weeks. Petroceltic has a 27% interest and operatorship of the Ksar Hadada permit, but successfully farmed out the Ksar Hadada block in Q2 2009 to…
