Berenberg starts Hurricane Energy at 'buy', says 'first oil' announcement imminent

Analysts a Berenberg kicked-off their coverage of Hurricane Energy with a 'buy' recommendation and a 100.0p target price ahead of the expected announcement of first oil at Lancaster, which they predicted would come in the next few days.

"We think there is an attractive risk/reward at current levels and expect the stock to react positively to incremental news-flow on EPS developments at Lancaster, starting with an announcement of first oil, which we expect in the coming days," Berenberg explained.

A full de-risking of Lancaster would add 7.0p to their estimates for the company's NAV per share.

And according to the broker, many other potentially positive catalysts for the share price lay ahead over the back half of 2019.

The German broker said if successful in de-risking th development concept for so-called fractured basements on the UK continental shelf, that "could transform it into one of the biggest exploration and production (E&P) companies under our coverage".

Key for that would be the Early Production System for the Greater Warwick and Greater Lancaster areas, they said.

In particular, Hurricane would need to closely monitor the production pressure while implementing the EPS, with a first update likely at the company's Capital Markets Day in the summer.

Should it succeed in de-risking the development concept, that could unlock in excess of 2.5bn barrels in resources, with the bulk of those coming from Lancaster.

Berenberg pegged the full de-risked value of GWA and GLA - assuming successful development - at 280.0p per share.

More details were also expected at the CMD on 16 April regarding the results of the Warwick Deep well, whose aim was to delineate the adjacent Lincoln discovery in order to ascertain if the Warwick discovery was simply an extension of Lincoln.

As of 1401 BST, shares of Hurricane Energy were leaping 8.12% higher to 61.90p.