Cairn abuzz at prospect of Greenland oil

AS he prepared for the taps to be turned on at Cairn Energy’s massive Indian oil fields, five years after they were discovered, Mike Watts, head of exploration, admitted he was “pregnant with excitement”.

But Watts wasn’t gloating about how the Edinburgh-based oil explorer had been catapulted into the FTSE 100 by a hunch about the Rajasthan desert, a view that had been dismissed by Shell after early drilling came to nothing.

Speaking just days ahead of yesterday’s ceremony, which officially began production from Cairn’s giant Rajasthan fields, Watts wasn’t even talking about India. Instead, his thoughts were thousands of miles away, in the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic Ocean.

Based on another hunch, Watts now believes it might be on the verge of an even bigger mine of black gold, this time in a country where no one has found a single barrel of oil