ELPE (Hellenic Petroleum) appears set to place bids for a number of the twenty offshore blocks being offered through an international tender in the Ionian Sea, western Greece, and south of Crete. According to ELPE officials, the company has also held talks aiming for collaborative work with a major foreign partner.

ELPE is one of three enterprises to have purchased seismic data from the Norwegian company PGS, which has conducted survey work at the offshore areas offered through the tender. To date, Exxon Mobil and Total are the other two buyers of the PGS data.

In other developments at ELPE, the company’s Exploration Manager Yannis Grigoriou told a recent Institute of Energy for Southeast Europe (IENE) event that the Greek oil company plans to begin conducting three-dimensional survey work in the Gulf of Patras, for which it holds exploration and exploitation rights, within 2015. It expects to begin drilling in the region in 2017, Grigoriou noted.