Target at about 4,400 meters/Open Day on 20 June 2008

Lingen/Kassel. On the 3 June 2008, the drilling of Leer Z6 near Breiner-moor (Westoverledingen district) began in order to tap into the additional gas reserves embedded there in the Rotliegend sandstone.

The consortium partners in the project are Wintershall Holding AG, from Kassel, and Gaz de France Produktion Exploration Deutschland GmbH (GDF-PEG), based in Lingen (Ems), as operator. The well is being sunk with a drilling rig supplied by KCA Deutag Drilling GmbH from Bad Ben-theim and the project is being supervised by the State Office for Mining, Energy and Geology in Clausthal-Zellerfeld.

With approval from the authorities having been obtained, drilling operations started at the beginning of the month on a specially fortified area about the size of a football pitch and partly surrounded by a soundproof wall in ‘Moorkampen’ street. As with previous projects in this region, first of all a well is drilled vertically and then horizontally at a depth of about 3,000 me-ters. This technically very sophisticated process made it possible to set up the well site further away from the protected hedgerow area and the resi-dential area. The well is expected to reach its target in the Rotliegend sandstone at a depth of about 4,400 meters in October 2008, after a hori-zontal section of over nine hundred meters and an overall area of nearly 5,800 meters.

At the moment drilling is progressing through the chalk formation. Joachim Sluet, the project manager from GDF-PEG, is very satisfied with the project so far. “We are making good progress and are in the middle of casing the well at a depth of up to 1,540 metres”. Steel pipes with a diameter of 13 3/8 inches are encased in the borehole in order to stabilise it and to seal off the well from the mountains. Then the drilling operations will continue, although, as Mr Sluet points out, “we will need up to ten more drill bits be-fore we reach the target”.

Following a sequence of information events in which the various drilling projects in the Leer region were presented, the consortium partners are now giving any residents interested the opportunity to gain a first-hand impression of the operations at the site itself: on Friday, the 20th June 2008, there will be an Open Day from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the well site near Breinermoor, Moorkampen, hosted by BASF subsidiary Wintershall and GDF-PEG, which belongs to the Gaz de France Group, one of the largest energy groups in Europe.