Danish oil company DONG E&P has drilled a dry well in the southern North Sea some four kilometres from the Trym field, for which a development plan has been sent to Norwegian authorities.

Well 3/7-7 included Canadian oil company Talisman (30 percent), Gaz de France (16 percent) and Aberdeen’s Faroe Petroleum with 14 percent. The field borders Danish waters.

The well was sought oil and gas in rock of the Late Jurassic era some 3,888 metres below the seabed. The rocks were “good” but no area hydrocarbons were found “movable”.

The well will come as a blow to planners of the 2.4 billion (Danish) kroner Trym project, which aims to tie-back as much as oil as possible to the Harald platform The field is being developed via a six-kilometre pipeline from the Norwegian to the Danish sector of the North Sea, and an extra oil well would have boded well for project economics.

Faroe chief exec Graham Stewart expressed the partners' optimistic reserve about well 3/7-7, known as the Marsvin prospect.

'The results for this first well on Marsvin were disappointing, however the licence holds a number of additional promising prospects adjacent to the substantial Trym gas field," Stewart said.

Meanwhile, by January first, parliamentarians should have okayed Trym as a subsea installation with two horizontal wells tied-back to and controlled from Harald, with gas continuing to the Tyra platform and onwards to Nybro in Denmark or Den Helder in the Netherlands.

Tags: DONG, Faroe Petroleum, Gaz de France, Talisman Energy