FINIAN O’SULLIVAN, chief executive of Burren Energy, the oil and gas exploration group, has worked in some of the world’s most inhospitable places.

He attributes his success to his willingness to go to locations where others fear to tread, and to his strategy of operating out of cashflow, never borrowing. He said: “I go places most people wouldn’t go. If you go to these places, you have to make it work on very little.”

Burren Energy began 12 years ago in O’Sullivan’s garage in Hampshire. Today it is a £1.4 billion (€2 billion) oil company. The firm is on the cusp of an ambitious exploration programme. O’Sullivan, a UCG geology graduate, hopes to add 490m barrels of reserves to his balance sheet in the next 18 months.

Burren, which has 246m barrels of proven and probable reserves, is stepping up exploration to take advantage of record oil prices. Up to 20 wells are to be drilled this year in Turkmenistan, Congo and Egypt. Drilling in Yemen and Oman will start next year.

The exploration programme, to cost $67m (€55m) this year, will start in the next few weeks when four rigs will explore the boundaries of M’Boundi, the 330m barrel Congolese field that Burren shares with the French firm Maurel et Prom.

Observers said Burren has had more than its share of luck in the risky business of oil exploration. The company’s share price has risen from 130p in late 2003 after it floated to 1,024p last Friday. Andrew Rose, chief financial officer, prefers to call it “good management at picking spots to chance our luck”.

The company’s beginnings date back to 1991 when two Texans asked O’Sullivan to examine international opportunities for them. One of the countries he went to was Turkmenistan, where he caught the eye of two men from Dubai who had won the rights to the biggest oilfield in western Turkmenistan for just $100,000.

O’Sullivan realised it was crucial to get any oil they produced to markets in Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey and the Black Sea region. He decided he needed some river ships. Then came what O’Sullivan calls his “big quirk of fate”. A guest of his sister, who was fishing at her farm on the Blackwater river in Ireland, told her he was involved in marine insurance, specifically the refurbishment of eastern block and Russian ships. She introduced the man, Simon Hume-Kendall, to her brother.

The meeting led to O’Sullivan teaming up with Hume-Kendall and Michael Jolliffe to form Burren Energy in 1994. They chartered tankers from Volgotanker, the Russian river-sea shipping company. Their contact there, Andrei Pannikov, is still a Burren director.

Monument Oil was so impressed by Burren’s early data from Turkmenistan that it signed a production-sharing agreement in 1995. The company also caught the eye of Tacoma Resources, a Swiss oil-trading company with interests in the Congo. Tacoma and Burren signed a production-sharing deal for Congo in 1996. Burren later bought out Tacoma’s share. In 2001, O’Sullivan and Maurel et Prom found the lucrative M’Boundi field.

In 2003, Burren floated on the London stock market, giving it a market value of £175m. It is now worth £1.4 billion.

O’Sullivan said: “Oil companies are not necessarily complicated. There are two things you have to do — expand production and replace reserves.” Over the past three years, Burren has found three times more oil than it has extracted.

Richard Slape, oil analyst at Seymour Pierce, said: “One chapter is about to close and another begin for Burren. It has probably realised the bulk of the value in Turkmenistan and M’Boundi. If the oil price does not continue to rise, something else will be needed to keep the momentum going and the company is building up an exploration portfolio. The jury is out on what will happen but there is still some upside potential.”

O’Sullivan admitted Burren could attract bids. “When you get to this level, you are on radar screens. But the shareholder case will have to be strong. A new owner will be hard pushed to do a better job,” he said.