Latest Hammerhead discovery 4B barrels

Kay Cashman

Petroleum News

ExxonMobil has named its latest oil discovery Hammerhead, but instead of being offshore Alaska’s North Slope, this Hammerhead is offshore the tiny South American nation of Guyana.

The 4 billion-barrel discovery was announced Aug. 30 by Exxon, which noted Hammerhead was its ninth offshore Guyana discovery.

According to a recent statement by Wood Mackenzie, a trusted source of commercial information about the world’s natural resources, Exxon’s exploration success in the last few years has been 82 percent and established the Guyana basin as one of the world’s offshore exploration hot spots.

Alaska’s Hammerhead, renamed Sivulliq by Shell in 2016, straddles an area north of the boundary between state-owned North Slope land and ANWR’s 1002 area. In the western part of Camden Bay, the federal prospect is northeast of Exxon’s Point Thomson field and has a known oil pool between 100 million to 200 million barrels in size, per a well drilled by Unocal in the mid-1980s.

Because it was too far from infrastructure at the time - not the case today - the reservoir has not been delineated.

In 2012, Shell started drilling an exploration well at Hammerhead but was only able to complete the top hole section of the well.

Arctic Slope Regional Corp.’s exploration arm, AEX, has since acquired the leases from Shell.

- KAY CASHMAN