SHARES in Cairn Energy lost ground yesterday after the oil and gas explorer said it had failed to strike it lucky at one of its sites in Bangladesh.
The Edinburgh-based group has been in Bangladesh for more than ten years and, along with its joint-venture partner, US giant Halliburton, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars.
It started drilling the Magnama site in the Bay of Bengal well
three months ago, and was due to reach total depth in December. Cairn had been targeting about 3.5 trillion cubic feet of gas from the prospect, or 500 million barrels of oil equivalent.
However, a senior Bangladeshi government official said the drilling at the offshore site had failed to discover commercially viable gas.
Jalal Ahmed, chairman of the state-run Bangladesh Oil, Gas, and Mineral Corporation, said: "Today we received the disappointing news from Cairn officials."
Shares in Cairn, which recently re-entered the FTSE 100 index, dipped 16p to close at 3,074p, having hit 3,045p earlier in the shortened London session.
The group, which was catapulted into the big time on the back of major discoveries in India, will now move its drilling rig to the neighbouring Hatiya site.
Although that site is smaller, analysts see it as being a slightly lower risk.
The full article contains 222 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
