British exploration firm reports €480k profit

British exploration firm, Europa Oil & Gas, which has two potentially huge prospects in Irish waters, has reported a pre-tax profit of £407,000 (€480,000) for the 12 months to the end of July.

The swing into full-year profit (the London-based explorer recorded pre-tax losses of just over £12m in its previous financial year) came on the back of lower sales costs and favourable impairment comparisons to the previous year.

Excluding exploration write-offs and impairment costs, Europa posted a pre-tax profit of £600,000 for the year. Cash generated from operations fell from £2.1m to £1.6m, but the firm’s net cash balance improved from £200,000 to £700,000.

Europa’s interests stretch across Britain, Ireland, France and Romania. In Ireland, it has two prospects in the South Porcupine Basin, off the Kerry coast. Earlier this year US firm Kosmos Energy acquired an 85% holding in the two prospects (with Europa retaining 15%) to cover 3D seismic and exploration costs.

Europa — which is interested in upping its presence in Irish waters via participation in future licensing rounds — said, yesterday, that its Irish licences contain prospects “that may hold very large volumes of oil”.

The mean total resource potential of the assets has been estimated at around two billion barrels of oil and the company said exploration success at the Irish prospects “would be utterly transformational for Europa”.