From Houston (BN): Cobalt has raised its ownership to 47% in the Goodfellow (32/7) prospect in the Gulf of Mexico and assumed operatorship after buying Eni’s share.

Located in Walker Ridge Block 89, Goodfellow is considered a promising Inboard Lower Tertiary target. Cobalt Chairman and CEO Joe Bryant said plans call for exploration drilling in 2016.

The deal is subject to the preferential-right-to-purchase of partners Total and Samson but is expected to close in August.

New regulator rules for calculating abandonment creditworthiness have caused LLOG to withdraw plans to drill four wells at Mothball in Mississippi Canyon 801.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said, “Each company must have assets to cover abandonment costs of not only existing wells but also permitted wells that have not been drilled,” Rick Fowler, vice president of deepwater projects, told SEN by email.

“Historically, E&P companies (including LLOG) would permit up to five wells on a block when they planned to drill one just so they would have flexibility to change the surface location if needed. Now, industry E&P companies tend to withdraw any permits that they don’t plan to drill in the near term in order to reduce their total abandonment liability (as calculated by the BOEM).”

Fowler said LLOG remains optimistic about Mothball and still plans to drill it before the lease expires in 2018. The prospect is in 1,022 m of water about 90 km off the Louisiana Coast.

Schlumberger has launched a new survey in the Campeche Basin to expand its Gulf of Mexico multiclient wide-azimuth seismic data portfolio.

The survey offshore Mexico will cover 80,000 sq km using two fleets of WesternGeco vessels, including Amazon Class, the world’s first purpose-designed 3-D seismic vessels.

Total said it is on track to start drilling for oil and gas off Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast early next year.

Total, operator of the offshore Han Asparuh 1-21 Block along with OMV and Spain’s Repsol, had postponed drilling there due to the fall in oil prices.

Earlier, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said that exploration was expected to begin in February.

The Brazilian government plans to hold a new oil bidding round for areas in the subsalt polygon by 2017, Marco Antonio Almeida, the secretary of oil and gas at the Mines and Energy Ministry, said on August 17.

Almeida denied during a presentation in Rio that the current corruption scandal plaguing state oil company Petrobras was delaying the auction being held sooner.

GeoPartners, in partnership with MAGE, Seabird Exploration and DownUnder GeoSolutions, has kicked off the acquisition of a new regional multiclient 2-D (MC2D) seismic survey called North Celtic Sea 2015. This Ireland/U.K. cross-border project is located mostly in the Irish North Celtic Sea and St. Georges Channel.

Acquisition commenced in early July using the MAGE vessel Nikolay Trubyatchinsky (formerly Polar Explorer). Plans are to acquire up to 6,000 km of long offset broadband data.

Noble Energy has kicked off drilling on the deepwater Humpback (32/3) prospect offshore the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The company is operating the wildcat with a 35% interest, with the probe targeting more than 250 MMbbl of gross unrisked oil resources. It is expected to hit total depth within the next three months. Humpback lies in the Fitzroy sub-basin in the South Falkland Basin. It is the first of several multiple stacked fan prospects in the sub-basin that are likely to be drilled. The cluster of prospects have a combined total of more than 1 Bbbl of estimated recoverable oil reserves. Humpback sits in 1,271 m of water and will be drilled to a planned 5,349 m total depth.

Offshore