UK Oil & Gas (UKOG), a majority shareholder of Horse Hill Developments and operator of the Horse Hill Oil Project in the Weald Basin in southern England received a production permit from the Environment Agency on Thursday which helped boost the company’s shares by 25% to 0.14p.
UK Oil & Gas stated that the Environment Agency has issued a full production permit to UKOG’s 85.6% owned Horse Hill oil field.
Production and water re-injection activities, waste gas incineration, maintenance and the drilling of additional development wells are all allowed under the production permit.
To date, production at Horse Hill has been governed by prior testing consents that prohibit the reinjection of produced saline formation water.
UKOG may now go on with its plans to turn Horse Hill-2z into a water injector by 2022, eliminating the requirement for costly transportation and disposal of produced saline formation water at third-party sites.
On September 24, 2019, the Environment Agency received the initial application for the production permit, which was submitted 31 months ago.
Following the production permit, a feasibility study for resuming Kimmeridge production as well as new Portland infill drilling locations is underway.
George Frangeskides, Executive Chairman, UK Oil & Gas, commented, “This is welcome news. We look forward to hearing of the Operator’s plans for enhancing productivity and delivering on the inherent, and to date largely untapped, value of the Horse Hill Oil Field.”