Positive progress for Frontera Resources at South Kakheti

Independent oil and gas explorer and producer Frontera Resources updated the market on positive progress at its South Kakheti Gas Complex on Thursday, situated within its upstream portfolio in Georgia.

The AIM-traded company had announced the commencement of operations within the central portion of the South Kakheti Gas Complex, related to a multi-well frac campaign, which had now been completed.

Its board said early results had demonstrated that the most recent well-completion designs had provided successful reservoir stimulations to wells that were not previously able to produce.

Additionally, in the case of a producing well production was successfully increased fivefold.

“Specifically, in the case of wells T-33 and T-36 that were drilled in 1979 during the Soviet era and abandoned because they were deemed to be ‘dry holes’, Frontera's hybrid-unconventional reservoir analysis resulted in well-stimulation/completion designs that have achieved production of approximately 15-20 bbls per day, per well from wells that never produced in the past,” the board said in a statement.

Frontera said the successful results from the most recent campaign had served to further refine and validate technical assumptions related to the company’s progress towards large-scale exploitation of the significant associated oil-in-place volumes related to the particular area of the complex.

The board also confirmed that 120 million new ordinary shares had been issued to certain strategic service providers for the procurement of around $750,000 of oil field services including workover, drilling, logging, completion and transportation services.

Application was to be made for the shares to be admitted to AIM, which was expected on 12 April.

"The results of our most recent stimulation campaign at the South Kakheti Gas Complex's Oil Window are extremely exciting,” said chairman and chief executive Steve Nicandros.

“The technology that we have successfully employed with our low-cost in-house stimulation capabilities have allowed us to yield results that are consistent with technical analogues of hybrid-unconventional reservoir plays in the United States that have been successfully developed in a similar manner.”

Nicandros said it was technically significant to appreciate that Frontera had achieved such good results from small-scale stimulations into its most recent single zone completions.

“Based on the results we have achieved, we now feel technically confident to scale-up the size of our stimulation designs in order to achieve considerably larger production outcomes.

“When combined with planned multiple zone completions, we believe that this provides the basis for developing the giant oil-in-place volumes that our historical work has identified,” he concluded.

Trading in Frontera Resources was choppy throughout the day, and at 1450 BST they were down 10.29% at 0.46p.