re: $3 (no-ball) Hi No-ball,HDR will hit $3 on August 19. (I...

re: $3 (no-ball) Hi No-ball,

HDR will hit $3 on August 19. (I would have chosen the 18th but King Louie beat me too it)

Sotto will spud next week. They will announce a commerical oil find on the 17th and HDR will hit $3 on the 19th. With the new CSEM technology I expect a lot of black stuff to be found this year. Exxon got 13 out of 13 hits in offshore Angoloa using this technology.

CSEM will revolutionize offshore exploration and greatly increase the market value of companies with large greenfield acerage, like HDR. HDRs shareprice will easily hit $5 when this technology is applied to Guyana, Fauklands and the rest of Mauritania. No more guesswork in offshore drilling. Ted deserves everything he got for picking up all these sites on the cheap many years ago.




http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:GkklxudtYG8J:www.oilonline.com/news/features/oe/20041201.All_at_s.16706.asp+csem+angola&hl=en

All at sea with EM
from: Offshore Engineer
by: Andrew McBarnet
Wednesday, December 01, 2004

It is being hailed as the most significant E&P technology innovation since 3D seismic surveying took off in the late 1980s. Andrew McBarnet brings this update on the interest in offshore applications of controlled source electro-magnetic methods and on the growing business it is generating.





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A flurry of activity over the past six months has finally lifted the lid on the emerging use of controlled source electro-magnetic measurements (CSEM) to detect offshore hydrocarbons, particularly in deep water but potentially in other exploration and production environments. The technology (normally seen as a complement to seismic) offers the promise of fewer dry wells in costly operational locations, improved ranking of development prospects, and more accurate or reduced appraisal drilling. It is even being suggested that companies may sometimes be able to go straight from 2D seismic to CSEM without the need for a costly 3D seismic survey. Down the road, time-lapse reservoir monitoring may be one of the applications considered.
Awareness of CSEM for the uninitiated may have been stirred by a recent front page article in the Wall Street Journal. The main impact of the feature was to effectively 'out' ExxonMobil's cloak and dagger strategy over the best part of two years with regard to its reportedly highly successful survey operations using CSEM. At much the same time Morgan Stanley Equity Research, North America, came out with a comprehensive, proprietary overview predicting that CSEM operations could leap from a $30 million to $600-900 million business in four or five years. This would equate to 25% of current spending on offshore seismic.

The Morgan Stanley report credited CSEM with contributing to ExxonMobil's remarkable run of 13 out of 13 discovery wells offshore Angola. This assertion has not appeared in subsequent, updated versions of the report, nonetheless the implications were there to be drawn: CSEM looks like a key risk management tool for future offshore E&P.

The excitement about CSEM is that it offers a way of enhancing seismic data in being able to confirm whether hydrocarbons are present in a structure, without going to the expense of drilling a well. This has become especially relevant as the industry's exploration effort has moved into deeper and deeper waters where a single well costs $50 million and upwards. Use of electromagnetic techniques for determining the nature of the subsurface is scarcely new; in the oil industry wireline logging to measure the subseafloor electrical resistivity is a routine part of exploration and reservoir development. CSEM offers a non-invasive solution, albeit at a lower vertical resolution, which under the right circumstances can distinguish between water-filled and oil/gas filled drilling targets.

The basic technique involves the deployment of a horizontal electric dipole source which transmits a low frequency electromagnetic signal to an array of seabed receivers. As the source is towed over the receiver array, recording the variations in the amplitude and phase of the received signal provides the data to determine the resistivity structure of the subsurface. The technology takes advantage of the fact that there is a significant contrast between resistive hydrocarbon saturated reservoirs and surrounding more conductive layers saturated with aqueous saline fluids.

ExxonMobil in its few public utterances on its CSEM operations refers to its proprietary Remote Reservoir Resistivity (R3M) technology. For example, in August the company announced its return to hydrocarbons exploration offshore Colombia with partners Ecopetrol and Petrobras. Tim Cejka, president of ExxonMobil Exploration, said the company was excited about bringing its global expertise and technologies, including R3M, to the project fuelling speculation that its CSEM capability was the clincher in winning the approval of Colombia's National Hydrocarbon Agency.

However, for those in the know, ExxonMobil's CSEM capability is just one piece in a complicated jigsaw of interlocking relationships. For sure, Dr Len Srnka of ExxonMobil is well known in the research world for his interest in EM, evidenced by the filing of an early patent on marine EM. But the technology actually evolved as the result of a number of mainly academic research initiatives in North America and Europe going back to the 1980s, for a long time unheralded and under-funded by industry, partly because oil companies at the time were mesmerized by the dramatic returns in exploration success afforded by investment in 3D seismic.

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