Eland Oil & Gas Share News (ELA)

(ShareCast News) - Nigeria-focused oil and gas production and development company Eland Oil & Gas was celebrating some impressive test results from its joint venture OML 40 project on Monday, after re-entering the Opuama-3 well and completing the perforation of two new intervals.The AIM-traded company said that, following the production logging tool runs in both strings of the Opuama 3 well the water ingress was identified to be coming from the lower D5000 producing interval. A cement plug was placed across the interval of the D5000 reservoir with a coiled tubing intervention to isolate it.Oriented perforations were shot into the D1000 upper reservoir in the Long Strong, and into the D2000 reservoir in the Short String, Eland's board confirmed, with both strings produced to a storage barge and the flow rate tested.The Short Strong flowed for six hours on a 48/64" choke, and produced 1,137 barrels of oil, extrapolating to 4,548 barrels of dry crude per day. The Long Strong flowed for one hour on the same sized choke and produced 235 barrels of oil, equating to 5,640 barrels of dry crude in a day.Eland said the cement job had removed more than 1,000 barrels of water production from the well, significantly reducing its water cut.The combined flow rate from both strings was then tested for one hour, producing 441 barrels of oil, extrapolating to a total of 10,584 barrels of dry crude per day from Opuama-3."We are very pleased to announce the successful completion of the Opuama-3 re-entry and the strong results from flow testing the well," said Eland CEO George Maxwell."The results are beyond the high end of our previously announced expected range of 2,000-4,000 incremental gross barrels of oil produced per day."Maxwell said the two newly perforated reservoirs had proven to be highly productive, with the initial combined flow rate to be less than 10,584 barrels per day on normalised production, but still well in excess of previous forecasts."Following this significant success we now move our focus to the Gbetiokun-1 workover well, also on licence OML 40," Maxwell explained."Our current plan is to commence operations on this high quality asset in the second half of the year, and we anticipate that a successful workover will lead to our current forecast of gross production in the range of 5,000-10,000 barrels of oil per day from the Gbetiokun-1 well."