The 250 million barrel find which is 100 million barrels more than the organisation originally expected to find is located to the West of Shetland.

The Lincoln Well was planned to exclude testing, and the well is now being plugged and abandoned ahead of the Transocean Spitsbergen drilling rig being demobilised from the Lincoln Well. A further announcement will be made once weather and sea state conditions have allowed for the rig to move to the Halifax well location and for the well to be spudded.

Cheif Executive of Hurricane Energy Dr Robert Trice said: “I am delighted that, at the end of an extraordinary year for Hurricane, the Lincoln Well has discovered a significant oil column outside structural closure on our Greater Lancaster Area acreage. Our initial assessment of the drilling results will be subject to refinement by analysis of wireline and sidewall core data, however, current analysis indicates that our pre-drill resource assessments – which were constrained by the oil down to in the Arco Well – of approximately 250 million barrels of recoverable oil for the Lincoln prospect may be conservative.