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Rosneft and ExxonMobil discover oil in Arctic drilling operation

Rosneft and ExxonMobil discover oil in Arctic drilling operation
Rosneft and ExxonMobil have discovered oil in controversial drilling operations in the Arctic.

Russian oil and gas firm Rosneft said that drilling had been completed on the northern most well in the world in the Kara Sea with a discovery of oil in the East-Prinovozemelskiy-1 license area.

The well was drilled in open-water conditions using the North Atlantic Drilling (NADL) rig West Alpha. NADL is a listed spin-off of John Fredriksen’s Seadrill.

“I can inform you about the discovery of the first oil/gas-condensate field in the new Kara sea oil province. The first oil was extracted. It is an astonishing sample of light oil, which based on the results of the analysis performed, is comparable to the Siberian Light oil,” said Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft.

“The resource base estimate of just this oil trap is 338bcm of gas and more than 100m tonnes of oil. This is an outstanding result of the first exploratory drilling on a completely new offshore field.”

The drilling operation took one and a half months. Although covered by US sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine, ExxonMobil said on 19 September it was complying with sanctions, but the US Treasury Department granted it license to carry out safe winding down operations on the exploration well.