Harvest Natural Resources to Plug Well in Oman, Shares Fall

Tallahassee, FL 12/8/11 (StreetBeat) -- Harvest Natural Resources, Inc. (NYSE: HNR) announced today that the Mafraq South-A (MFS-1) exploration well onshore Oman has reached a revised total depth (TD) of 10,348 feet. Logs did not indicate the presence of hydrocarbons within the stacked reservoir targets in the Barik, Miqrat and Amin reservoirs, and the well will be plugged and abandoned. The reservoirs were encountered shallower than expected with reduced seal thickness, and failure is attributed to the lack of seal effectiveness. The quality of the Barik and the Amin reservoirs was better than expected.

Drilling operations on the MFS-1 well progressed ahead of schedule with the well reaching TD 28 days ahead of the forecast drill time. Consequently the dry hole cost will be lower than previously forecast and Harvest expects to expense $5.5 million in the current quarter.

MFS-1 is the first of a two-well exploratory program utilizing the MB Petroleum Services LLC Rig #113 drilling unit. The rig will now move approximately 30 miles west to test the Al Ghubar North structure (AGN-A) which has the same stacked reservoir targets in the Barik, Miqrat and Amin formations in a different trap style to Mafraq South.

The AGN-A well is expected to spud in late December. Targets are in the hanging wall fault block of a large salt supported structure, 10 miles to the east and updip from the producing Barik field. Mean prospective resources of 960 Bcf of gas and 54 MMbbls of condensate in the Barik and 241 Bcf of gas in the Miqrat formation have been calculated. The geological chance of success for a discovery in this well is estimated by Harvest to be 23 percent. The AGN-A well will be drilled to a total vertical depth of approximately 10,300 feet to test coincident fault bounded dip closure at all three reservoir levels. Dry hole cost for the AGN-A well is $8.1 million.

Harvest has an 80 percent interest in Block 64 onshore Oman . Block 64 has an area of 3,874 square kilometers and was extracted from a pre-existing block (PDO's Block 6) to accelerate exploration for gas and gas condensate by the Omani Ministry of Oil and Gas.

The company's share are currently trading down 8% at $8.01.

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