OMV makes Arctic oil discovery Austrian oil company OMV has made one of the first big discoveries in a largely unexplored part of the Barents Sea. The group on Friday said it had found as much as 160m barrels of recoverable oil at a wildcat well - outside known oilfields - in Wisting Central. The area lies in the Arctic waters about 200 miles north of Norway's coastline, and to the northeast of Statoil's Johan Castberg discovery. The find comes three weeks after OMV spent $2.65bn to buy stakes in oilfields owned by Statoil in the North Sea in a move that began to reorientate Austria's biggest group by revenues away from its investments in unstable regions - such as Yemen, Libya and Pakistan - towards more secure western projects. Around a 10th of OMV's total output comes from Libya, where production has been severely disrupted during the unrest of the Arab Spring, and OMV said on Friday that production in the country had once more been halted. Jaap Huijskes, a member of OMV's executive board in charge of exploration and production said the Arctic find would "significantly contribute to OMV's long-term organic growth in northern Europe." The find contains 60m-160m barrels of recoverable oil, OMV said, as well as between 10bn and 40bn cu ft of recoverable gas. It is in a comparatively shallow part of the Barents Sea, where the water is 373m deep. "It is another important step after the recently announced transaction with Statoil, which includes interests in the fields Gullfaks and Gudrun," Mr Huijskes said. The move is also a boost for OMV's efforts to concentrate its efforts on the upstream parts of the oil business, such as exploration and production, and away from refining and marketing. In recent months it has been divesting downstream assets such as petrol stations in southeast Europe and Cyprus and gas storage facilities in Austria, while investing in oil and gas discoveries in Romania, Australia and Iraqi Kurdistan. OMV described the Wisting find, which it operates and in which it has a 25 per cent stake, as "a breakthrough for the regional exploration activities," adding that the area was likely to see more drilling in the "near future." The Vienna-based group has joint partner interests in three more licences in the vicinity, and expects further drilling in one of them next year. Statoil, which has a 15 per cent stake in the Wisting discovery, also plans to drill two wells of its own nearby. The Norwegian government said this year that it would open up the southeast Barents Sea to oil exploration for the first time after finally laying to rest a decades-old border dispute with Russia. Shares in OMV were up 0.6 per cent at €36 in early afternoon trading in Vienna.