Gatwick has promised to ‘bear all the main risks’ of an expansion programme A tiny UK oil explorer has claimed there could be up to 100bn barrels of oil beneath the home counties of southeast England, after drilling at a well near Gatwick airport. Shares in UK Oil & Gas Investments (UKOG), an Aim-traded oil exploration company, leapt 220 per cent on Thursday after it said that the Weald Basin held 158m barrels of oil per square mile, far outreaching previous government-funded estimates. UKOG claimed to have discovered a “world-class potential resource” in a 650ft section some 3,000 to 5,000ft below the ground after drilling into the Weald Basin at Horse Hill in Surrey. However, industry analysts were sceptical about the company’s claims and how much oil could be economically recovered from the area. David Lenigas , chairman of UKOG, extrapolated that the whole basin could contain “multiple billion […]