Wintershall plans additional heavy investments in Norwegian exploration and development activities

“The expansion of our activities in Norway is making very good progress. Wintershall is involved in six of the twelve largest oil discoveries in Norway over the last five years,” Bachmann said at the start of the conference. Wintershall had set itself the target of producing around 50,000 BOE per day in the northern North Sea by 2015, he added. “The Continental Shelf still has considerable potential. We want to tap into that potential,” the Wintershall Board Member explained. In this year alone, the wholly owned subsidiary of the world’s largest chemicals company, BASF, is spending almost 50 percent of its global exploration budget in Norway. The company plans to invest around eight billion Norwegian kroner in the next five years (around a billion euros). “In our significant investments in Norway we focus on the entire E+P life cycle - from exploration to production. This is certainly not a strategy practiced by all international E+P companies in Norway these days,” Bachmann ex-plained.
Following the success of Wintershall’s own operated wells “Grosbeak” and “Maria” (both offshore Norway), Wintershall also struck oil with its third operated well, Blakeney, in the British North Sea around 150 kilometers east of Aberdeen in August this year. These discoveries are complemented by three other successful exploration wells in which Wintershall is involved as a partner. Wintershall has a 20 percent stake in the so-called Catcher discovery, which was made in the British North Sea in June. The very promising field is set to be investigated with additional wells in the near future to determine whether further deposits can be proven. In addition, the well “Beta”, around 15 kilometers north-west of the Snorre field in the northern Norwegian North Sea was able to prove the existence of oil. Wintershall also has a 33.5 percent working interest in the Cladhan discovery in the British North Sea where an appraisal well was drilled successfully in August. With around 40 licenses, the company is one of the largest license holders in Norway – in almost half of these licenses it holds the operatorship. Wintershall coordinates its activities in the Northern North Sea from Stavanger, the heart of Norway’s oil and gas industry.
Wintershall Holding GmbH, based in Kassel, Germany, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BASF in Ludwigshafen. The company has been active in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas for over 75 years. Wintershall focuses on selected core regions where the company has built up a high level of regional and technological expertise. These are Europe, North Africa, South America, as well as Russia and the Caspian Sea region. In addition, these operations are complemented by the company’s growing exploration activities in the Arabian Gulf. Today, the company employs more than 2,000 staff worldwide from 35 nations and is Germany’s largest crude oil and natural gas producer. With the subsidiaries it operates together with Russia’s Gazprom, WINGAS and WINGAS TRANSPORT, the BASF subsidiary is also an important gas supplier on the German and European market.