Gulf Keystone spuds new well in Northern Iraq

Gulf Keystone, the independent oil and gas explorer, says it has spudded a new well in its Sheikh Adi block, to the west of its huge Shaikan discovery in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

The current resource estimate for Shaikan is for 8-13.4bn barrels of oil while preliminary estimates for Sheikh Adi are between 1-3bn.

John Gerstenlauer, Gulf Keystone's Chief Operating Officer commented:

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"Sheikh Adi-2 is a significant addition to our extremely active 2012/2013 drilling programme in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. To date, we have completed or are currently drilling 13 exploration and appraisal wells across the four blocks in the region in which we have interest.

"The location for this well has been carefully selected and we believe that with Sheikh Adi-2 we are targeting a section of the reservoir which is potentially more naturally fractured and much more similar to the Shaikan discovery."

Gulf Keystone shares were down 0.74% just after the open.

BS