Tullow hits a big oil well in Turkana

British explorer, Tullow Oil, has hit another oil bonanza in Kenya, taking the country closer to hitting one billion barrels of recoverable reserves.  The company today announced more finds at the Erut-1 well in Turkana basin, in what is set to lift the country’s estimates of the black gold from 750 million barrels. “We are on track with our 1 billion+ barrels of oil target,” the firm said in a statement, citing ongoing exploration works.

The latest find involved drilling vertically through 25 metres of rock reservoir holding oil, which is similar to 25 metres of net oil pay. Tullow, however, declined to disclose the amount of barrels struck. “We cannot yet extrapolate exactly how much oil that is but it’s very encouraging,” the explorer said.

Tullow struck Kenya’s first oil in Turkana’s Lokichar basin in 2012 and followed it with a string of other finds that have put the country on the path to becoming an oil producer. The company is set to start churning out 2,000 barrels of crude oil daily for early small-scale exports in June as part of Kenyan government’s plan to test the global market.

The explorer last April announced another find that elevated Kenya’s recoverable reserves by 25 per cent from 600 million barrels to 750 million barrels. The latest wet well, Erut-1, was a virgin exploration field (wildcat well) without previous record for oil reserves.

It was drilled 1.3 kilometres with the overall oil column for the field considered to be 100 to 125 metres, according to Tullow.

[crp]