You have a valid point, it's a non-ideal situation having the casing shoe in the middle of the Pebbly Arkose if you want to sidetrack.
The whole casing design needs to be redesigned (additional intermediate liner maybe) for future wells because the 8.5" hole section is too long and that has had a knock on effect causing too much time logging and trying to get MDT samples. To reduce the risk and avoid having to redrill a well, it would have been more cost effective to drill the top third, log it plus MDT, then repeat the process as a third each time until TD.
They have tried to improve the mud loss characteristics and fine tune the mud weight in M-2, but to no avail. Further fine tuning of the mud properties will be essential for drilling future wells, however, I believe it would be better to concentrate on proving the commerciality of M-2 by avoiding unnecessary costs - to run the 7" liner as deep as possible following a wiper trip and try to get the cased hole MDT equivalent from SLB or try to bring forward the DST operations. That might mean no DST over the Lower Angwa until the next well, but there's porosity, resistivity, NMR and GR logs.
IVZ Price at posting:
13.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
