Back in the 1970s, there was a fanfare when Esso discovered the Seven Heads oil and gasfield in a section of the Celtic Sea only a few miles from Marathon's Kinsale Head gasfield.
Back then, the thought of oil coming ashore on the coast of Cork had the politicians of the time drooling. The Republic was supposed to be the next major world oil province but sadly, almost 20 years on, not a drop of the thick oil in the Seven Heads prospect has flowed ashore.
There is, however, a much greater likelihood that the gas overlying the oil in the Seven Heads structure will be brought ashore, given Ramco's decision to take a majority stake in the prospect.
Ramco has not indicated exactly how much gas there is in the Seven Heads reservoir but the recent appraisal well flowed at an impressive 13.7 million cubic feet of gas a day and Ramco seems pretty confident that the gasfield is commercial.
The Seven Heads field would not need to be very big to be commercial as sub-sea development systems tied into the Kinsale Head gas pipeline to the national gas grid would not be expensive. In contrast, Enterprise and its partners will have to bear far greater development costs to bring the Corrib field off Mayo into production.
