UK oil and gas contractors working through umbrella companies have some excellent news in the pipeline, with recent drilling successes being announced in the Falkland Islands. In fact, industry experts have said that around 8.3 billion barrels will come from the Falkland Islands’ waters in 2012, a figure that is three times the UK reserves. One of the three wells around the islands has been ranked as ‘among the world’s top 15 offshore prospects this year’ by Morgan Stanley, with Evan Calio, one of their analysts, commenting that “The area is underexplored and highly prospective. These could be like the high-impact wells in Ghana and Brazil a few years ago that opened up a whole host of basins.”
Brian Swint of Bloomberg added weight to the potential benefits of this story, indicating that ‘offshore oil in the waters around the islands could triple UK reserves and represent one of the biggest global oil and gas opportunities in the next few years’. It seems that, with South American governments already outing shipping restrictions in place, much of the supply to these emerging offshore oil fields will come directly from Europe, which means huge opportunities for the oil and gas engineering contractors who operate through umbrella companies, as well as for the UK supply chain as a whole.