Cyprus
Exploration Wells
Since 2011, 11 wildcats have been drilled in the Cypriot EEZ, and 6 of them found gas — a strike rate most frontier basins never see. No well has come back dry since 2018.
The drilling record
Every well ever drilled in the Cypriot EEZ, in the order it was spudded. Bar length is the water depth the rig had to reach before drilling even began.
6 of the 15 wells sit under more than 2 km of water and the shallowest, Amathusa-1, still had 1,600 m above it — this is a deepwater play by definition, which is why so few wells get drilled here. Depth below the seabed is a different number, published for only 6 of the 15 wells; where it exists it is on that well's own page.
Who has been drilling
All 15 wells were drilled by 5 operators, and two of them account for 11. Each row reads chronologically, so a campaign's learning curve is visible in the colour.
What a Cypriot well actually is
Roughly two kilometres of water, then another one and a half to four kilometres of rock before the bit reaches the carbonate reservoirs that hold the gas. Aphrodite-1 went to 5,860 m through 1,689 m of water and took just under four months, from spud in September 2011 to completion that January.
Where the blocks are →Updated July 2026 · Sources: MECI, CHC, operator announcements