Wintershall builds interest in Norway

• Tweet

KASSEL, Germany, Jan. 21 (UPI) -- German energy company Wintershall said it strengthened its commitment to northern Europe with three North Sea licenses off Norway.

Wintershall announced it would serve as the operator of three licenses awarded by the Norwegian government during a recent auction.

"We have invested a great deal in expanding our activities in Norway in the last few years -- the result is our own exploration discoveries as well as the recent asset swap with Statoil, in which Wintershall has agreed to acquire shares in three producing fields," Martin Bachmann, a Wintershall board member in charge of exploration and production, said in a statement.

Wintershall added that it aims to further assess a discovery at the Skarfjell North appraisal well off Norway's coast. An April estimate put the reserve potential there at 60 million-160 million barrels of recoverable oil.

Wintershall said it is one of the largest license-holders of assets on the Norwegian continental shelf.

The Norwegian government said there was a strong expression of interest from the energy industry in licenses available on the continental shelf. An assessment of the undiscovered resources and new discoveries prompted the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate to increase the estimate of total resources on the Norwegian continental shelf nearly 4 percent to 480 billion cubic feet of oil equivalents.