Norway’s Ministry of Petroleum has approved acquisitions of stakes in a series of North Sea oil exploration licenses worth more than $1bn.
Longboat Energy was set up by a group of energy entrepreneurs, led by the team of Faroe Petroleum, which was acquired in 2019 for £640m by DNO.
The Aberdeen-headquartered company has a portfolio of near-term, low-risk exploration assets and has been granted approval following its announcement in June this year.
The company is now qualified as a licence holder on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), and subject to the finalisation of the usual completion procedures with the various counterparties, expects to complete the Farm-Ins on 1 September.
The drilling of the Egyptian Vulture prospect, scheduled to commence later this month, will be the first of an anticipated seven well exploration programme to be drilled by Longboat over the next 18 months on the NCS.
The drilling programme will be targeting net mean prospective resource potential of 104 million barrels equivalent (MMboe) with additional 220 MMboe follow-on prospectivity.
The programme has the potential to create a net asset value of more than $1bn, based on precedent transactions on the NCS for development assets.
The Farm-Ins constitute a reverse takeover transaction pursuant to the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) rules and as such the ordinary shares of Longboat will be cancelled from trading on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange on completion of the Farm-Ins.
Re-admission is expected to occur shortly thereafter. An application for readmission of the company's entire ordinary share capital to AIM will be made shortly.
On completion of the reverse takeover, the company will cease to be an investing company and will become an operating company instead.
Helge Hammer, chief executive of Longboat, commented: "We are pleased to announce this milestone for Longboat, which sees us join a select group of companies holding oil and gas assets on the Norwegian continental shelf and will enable us to complete the Farm-In transactions as planned.
"We are looking forward to spudding the first well in our multi-well programme later this month and will be updating shareholders on its progress in due course."
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