Neptune with partner Palatina GeoCon are testing oil at Schwegenheim-1 in the German Rhine Graben.
Location of the Schwegenheim-1 well in the German Rhine Graben.
Neptune with partner Palatina GeoCon are testing oil at Schwegenheim-1 in the German Rhine Graben, but not from the main target Triassic Buntsandstein Formation, which is the reservoir in the nearby Römerberg-Speyer oil field. Römerberg, believed to contain 150 MMbo in-place, was discovered by accident in 2003 whilst drilling to a geothermal target. Instead, two shallower secondary targets, of undisclosed age but speculated to be in the Upper Trias or Lower Tertiary, have been production tested in Schwegenheim-1, with a gross total of 1,500 bo being produced to a local refinery.
The well was drilled to 2,600m and took 53 days to drill. It is yet unclear if the discovery will be commercial, a similar situation to Rhein Petroleum’s Steig-1 2019 discovery which recovered a total of 4,000 bo from an Oligocene reservoir in the Rhine Graben. These two wells, plus drilling in the north of Germany by Neptune, such as at Adorf, demonstrate that exploration drilling is feasible in this part of Western Europe.
