Longboat gets nod for acquisitions from Norwegian government
North Sea-focussed exploration and production company Longboat Energy announced on Monday that Norway's Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has approved its acquisition of various exploration licence interests, as it announced on 1 June.
The AIM-traded firm said as a result, it was now qualified as a licence holder on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), and subject to finalising “the usual” completion procedures, expected to complete the farm-ins on 1 September.
It said the drilling of the Egyptian Vulture prospect, scheduled to start later in August, would be the first of an anticipated seven-well exploration programme, which would be drilled by Longboat over the next 18 months on the NCS.
The drilling programme would be targeting net mean prospective resource potential of 104 million barrels of oil equivalent, with additional 220 million barrels equivalent of upside and follow-on prospectivity.
Longboat daid the programme had the potential to create a net asset value of more than $1bn, based on precedent transactions on the NCS for development assets.
The board said the farm-ins constituted a reverse takeover transaction under the AIM rules, and as such its shares would be cancelled from trading on AIM on completion of the farm-ins.
Readmission was expected to occur shortly thereafter.
On completion of the reverse takeover, the company said it would cease to be an investing company under the AIM rules, and would 1become an operating company instead.
“We are pleased to announce this milestone for Longboat which sees us join a select group of companies holding oil and gas assets on the Norwegian continental shelf and will enable us to complete the farm-in transactions as planned,” said chief executive officer Helge Hammer.
“We are looking forward to spudding the first well in our multi-well programme later this month and will be updating shareholders on its progress in due course.”
At 1240 BST, shares in Longboat Energy were down 1.38% at 70.02p.