The drill bit at Badile, near Milan, has reached the second casing point at 1,407 metres less than a month after work began.
Sound Energy PLC (LON:SOU) is making rapid progress on two fronts having completed drilling in Morocco and made significant headway in Italy.
The former first: Its TE-8 well has reached a vertical depth 3,066 metres, taking it 359 metres into the Paleozoic formation, which is a new horizon for Sound.
It has already identified gas in the TAGI formation above. “The company confirms that it has observed further gas shows during subsequent drilling operations, but cautions that logging has not yet occurred and that gas shows, although a positive initial indication, should not be considered conclusive without further wireline logging and analysis,” the company said.
At its Badile gas well, near Milan, has reached the second casing point at 1,407 metres less than a month after work began.
The next casing point is at 2,600 metres – more than halfway to the planned target depth of 4,445 metres. Drilling and logging are expected to take 100 days.
To date the company has scored significant success at Tendrara, in Morocco, where it has discovered significant accumulations of potentially commercial gas.
However, Sound’s Italian assets were the foundation stone on which the company was built and it has two producing wells – although their output is modest.
Badile could be a changer for this portion of the portfolio. An independent assessment suggests the target could be host to around 178bn standard cubic feet of gas with a net present value of £400mln.
That figure is what’s called a ‘best case’, unrisked estimate. It sits at in the middle of the range with the ‘high case’ forecast being 670bn cubic feet and the ‘low case’ 46bn cubic feet.
