SHARES in Catalist-listed oilfield services firm Rex International surged on Wednesday amid heavy volume, following its morning announcement of an oil and gas discovery in the Norwegian Sea.
The counter was trading at 8.9 Singapore cents as at 1.32pm, up one cent or 12.66 per cent. Nearly 98 million shares had changed hands, making it the most actively traded counter on the Singapore bourse by the afternoon.
Before the market opened, Rex announced that a discovery had been made from the drilling of exploration and appraisal wells in the Shrek prospect in the PL838 licence.
The recoverable oil equivalents of the discovery is around three to six million standard cubic metres, or 19 to 38 million barrels, based on the preliminary estimates of PGNiG Upstream Norway, the operator of the licence.
Rex's 90 per cent-owned subsidiary Lime Petroleum AS holds a 30 per cent stake in the PL838 licence.
"With this discovery, we will have the option to move towards production, or to repeat our proven business model in Norway to farm-in, find oil, monetise and recycle capital, as we have done with the Rolvsnes discovery," said Dan Broström, executive chairman of Rex.