Three companies currently are underway with their drilling programmes: I3 Energy, Petro Matad and Hurricane Energy, which announced the spud of its Warwick West well earlier this week.  Petro Matad awaits the test results of Heron-1 and the initial drill results of Gazelle-1.

I3 Energy is awaiting the spud of its Serenity exploration well, with the Liberator appraisal well delayed pending the processing and interpretation of new seismic data.  Pending the outcome of the drills, I think the latter two are purely for trading. Of those with drills coming up and another one operating in the North Sea, Independent Oil & Gas announced the settlement of its 100 million Euro bond raise, fully funding them for their core project next year.

In the meantime, data acquired from the Harvey well is now undergoing analysis to generate a revised technical assessment of reservoir gas volumes and deliverability.

Onshore UK, Alba Mineral Resources and UK Oil & Gas announced the arrival of the rig at Horse Hill.  The spud of the Portland horizontal well is expected imminently.  Drilling operations are expected to be completed in approximately 60 days.

Empyrean Energy and Coro Energy announced the mobilisation of the jack up rig from Singapore, which is now en route to the location for the first well offshore Indonesia.  The campaign will comprise of two wells, one to appraise the Mako gas field discovery and one to both appraise the Mako gas field at another location  and test the deeper Tambak prospect.

Current favourites out of the above are UK Oil & Gas and, to a lesser extent, Independent Oil & Gas.  Coro might have some potential too.

Petrel Resources announced the appointment of Michel Fayad to the Board.They now aim to acquire and fund a big project in the Middle East & North Africa region.  I stated Petrel as a favourite at around 1p, it's now close to 10p - and perhaps going higher still.

Block Energy No surprises for blog readers in today's RNS.  Instead of the touted 1,100 barrels of oil per day, production actually turned out to be 230 barrels of liquid a day with a water cut of 78% That's just 50 barrels of oil per day, but still outdoes

Reabold Resources, who after a year of supposed production and announcements of wells coming in at several hundred barrels a day, were only able to announce actual net production of 20 barrels of oil per day.  Again, this will be no surprise to blog readers

Ending with some better quality companies which actually do produce commercial quantities of oil, Serica Energy and RockRose Energy announced interims with strong numbers.  Further acquisitions will be the big share price driver with these two. I'll be back at the weekend with more on the podcast. In the meantime, all the small-cap oil companies are covered in the blog and daily on Twitter.