Ocean Rig Athena drill ship commences mobilization to Senegal

The Ocean Rig Athena drill ship left Luanda, Angola, Monday and is now on its way to being a part of the drilling program in FAR Limited's highly prospective blocks in offshore Senegal.

Discovered in 2014 and recognized as the world's largest oil discovery for the year, the prospective Senegal drilling site has two wells in the three-drill program that will be appraised this month.

“Following last year’s incredibly successful drilling program and the encouraging geological work carried out since making our two world class discoveries, FAR looks forward to the commencement of our appraisal of the SNE field and building value through the drill bit over the coming months.”said Cath Norman, FAR managing director.

One of the appraisal program's main goals will be to prove the threshold economic field size that FAR estimates to be about 200 mmbbls for a foundation project.

Included in the firm drilling program will be coring and testing programs as well as two appraisal wells for SNE (SNE-2 and SNE- 3) and one shelf exploration well (BEL-1) to further evaluate the shelf area prospects.

The drilling, logging, coring and testing of all three wells is expected to be finished by mid-2016.