@Gharp youve been harping on about this ad nauseum. You sound like you know enough to know that the Amistad numbers now show anywhere between 5-10B BBL oil in place and its less than 2,000 m deep. No way anyone in the world will ignore this and not seek to obtain further info from it. It is a multi billion dollar field. My suggestion is to wait until they do the long term production testing through perf casing and after maybe some clean up and then talk.
@VOGC thx for the summary. Agree with most of it. Like you, and others, im flummoxed as to the market response.
I have one point where my opinion differs. This is based on my experience - we don't have the actual drilling and mud logs - but Melbana does and they would be all over this, and they will tell us once theyve had a chance to put it all together. Here goes:
- Im not sure about whether the well disturbance of the formation is as negligible as you have suggested. Whilst they may have been drilling balanced, they would have had to have "tweaked" the weight and had losses in the more permeable zones. It all depends on how quick they were to respond to it. They would be aware of how much "losses" into the formation they had and the potential for mud cake build up in the fractures. And therefore they would be in a position to assess the potential for this to happen and of course implement any remedial measures to fix before putting it on long term pump.
- Another issue is the effect of depressurising the formation once you start flowing it. From my own experience in drilling/pumping out of fractured rock, once you depressurise the formation (by pumping) there is a chance the fracture apertures will "close", thereby negatively impacting the original permeability. One of the tricks we used to use was to load up the water column to try to open up the near well bore fractures a bit so we can get better continuity between the well and the formation itself. A colleague of mine in Germany goes one further and actually sends some proppant down there to make sure the near well bore fractures dont close up on him.
anyway, whatever the case may be, theres cheap buying atm. Good luck everyone good post.
horizontal wells are de rigeur now. The systems are such you can control the trajectory with pinpoint accuracy. So they can target the fracture zones...which shoud be easy to pick as they are in the "basal" part of the unit.
the benefit here is that fraccing is unlikely to be required - thereby halving typical horizontal fracced well costs.
oils are oils and if you have 4 billion bbl, you will actually build a refinery to process it.
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