Providence Resources - TOR in Huston - Large players are showing increased...

Large players are showing increased interest in acreage offshore Ireland as they look to tap plays seen as analogous to large prospects and discoveries off eastern Canada.
The first phase of licence awards for the country’s latest round, issued in February, saw majors such as ExxonMobil, BP, Statoil, Eni, Woodside Petroleum and Nexen win blocks, with the round seeing the highest level of interest ever for an Irish offshore auction.

Tony O’Reilly, chief executive of Irish independent Providence Resources, said at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston on Wednesday that much of the success is down to recent successes across the North Atlantic.

“(Ireland was) always looked at as an adjunct to the North Sea – particularly in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. That is all changing and part of the success of the Atlantic Margin licensing round is the linkage to eastern Canada ... and people joining up the geological concept of the North Atlantic Jurassic oil source super highway.”

The Irish offshore has not had many commercial successes, and the ones there have been – the Petronas trio of Kinsale Head, Ballycotton and Seven Heads, as well as Shell’s Corrib field – were all gas, leaving an impression of Ireland’s offshore space as gas prone.

Providence was a partner in the ExxonMobil-operated Dunquin North wildcat drilled off the west coast in 2013, which proved to be a commercial duster. But O’Reilly said the results of the well were instrumental in changing oil companies’ thinking on offshore Ireland prospectivity.

“What this proved is that it was an oil-prone area, and that, in the context of what has happened in eastern Canada, has led to a whole change of focus on Ireland’s Atlantic margin.”

International players now talk of Ireland and Canada as being on the same North Atlantic conjugate play, in much the same way as plays in Brazil have proven analogous with those in Angola, or Ghana with Guyana. ExxonMobil in particular is understood to be targeting the Irish offshore as one of its key deep-water plays going forward.

“Most of the players in eastern Canada are in the Irish Atlantic margin,” O’Reilly said.

The second phase of awards under the latest licensing round will see more companies awarded acreage before the end of this month. O’Reilly pointed to the stiff competition Providence faced in the round as evidence that the country is being targeted by larger players.

“When we used to apply for these licences in 2004 and 2011, we were always a big player. We were not a big player this time. In fact we applied for some licences in the south but we didn’t get them. That was a sobering moment for us as a company as we had been so central, but actually it is great, as I would rather lose out to ExxonMobil and Statoil as it says something about our acreage position,” he said.

“We kind of knew that all the big players were coming because they will come to Ireland and talk to the government about the terms, and then they will come and try to take my technical director out and get him drunk and try to find out as much information as they can.”