Operator CCC had identified anomalies in the well from logs and encountered minor oil shows during drilling.
Participants in Block 49 are operator CCC (17.1%), Oil Search (42.3%), Virgin Resources (25.6%) and The Yemen Company (15%).
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Oil Search’s South Gharib-X1 well in Egypt, which spudded on December 7, is drilling ahead at a depth of 797m.
Oil Search is farming out a 30% stake in its wholly-owned Area A concession in Egypt’s Eastern Desert to Petrogas E&P.
In PNG, Oil Search has also spudded its NW Paua-1 exploration well about 5km northeast of the Moran oil field, which is targeting 40-120 million barrels of oil.
The well will test a structurally higher back limb location on the Paua anticline than the Paua-1x well that encountered oil shows in the Toro sandstone and recovered oil from the Iagifu sandstone in the mid 1990s.
With a planned total depth of 3377m, NW Paua-1 is targeting the Toro and Digimu sandstones in a seismically defined hanging wall structure.
Participants in NW Paua-1 are Oil Search (52.5%) and ExxonMobil (47.5%).
