PROSPECTORS used to taste the stuff to determine its quality, and the oil tapped on February 16th in the Surrey countryside sounded delicious: light, sweet and less than 1% water. UK Oil & Gas Investments (LON:UKOG), the firm operating the exploratory well at Horse Hill, just north of Gatwick airport, says its first two tankers-worth are already being refined and will be in petrol stations within a fortnight.
The company announced that it had struck oil a year ago, to some scepticism. But its test this week extracted nearly 500 barrels of good-quality crude from a depth of 900m (3,000 feet) in the Lower Kimmeridge limestone zone. The oil flowed to the surface under its own pressure, known in the parlance as a gusher. This is good news for UKOG, as it ought to mean fewer costly, dirty mechanical interventions and no need for unpopular “fracking” (which is legal in Britain only below 1,000m anyway). That, of course, is unlikely to shift the dogged environmental campaigners camped out at the site, who would rather the oil stayed in the ground.
