New discovery a good start for Apache in the British North Sea

March 26 (UPI) -- A discovery with at least 10 million barrels of oil was made after drilling into the British waters of the North Sea, Apache Corp. declared.

The company announced it made a "significant" discovery of oil while tapping its Garten discovery in the North Sea. Apache put the recoverable reserve estimate at 10 million barrels, at the high-end of its initial expectations.

"Garten marks the 2500th offshore exploration well on the British continental shelf and is an excellent start for exploration drilling in 2018," Andy Samuel, the chief executive at the British Oil and Gas Authority, said in a statement.

The trend is a testament to operations in a British North Sea facing declines because of field maturation. Lower crude oil prices in previous years, meanwhile, had dampened the appetite for spending on long-term and costly efforts offshore. With the market recovering, British analytics company Westwood Global Energy Group said it expects tens of billions of dollars in new spending on floating production systems along over the next five years.

In January, Premier Oil lifted its first cargo of oil using its floating production, storage and offloading vessel parked over the three fields in the North Sea that make up the Catcher area. A peak rate of around 60,000 barrels of oil per day is expected during the first half of 2018 from a complex where costs are 29 percent lower than initial estimates.

Apache ended 2017 with $1.7 billion in cash on hand, a 21 percent improvement from the year prior. The company said it's working closely with the British authority to get the approval necessary to start production at the Garten discovery by the first quarter of 2019.

In its latest earnings report, however, Apache said it plans to spend about $3 billion this year, with 70 percent of that targeting the Permian shale in the United States.