Sacgasco challenges dogmatic thinking
Monday, 10 October 2016
Haydn Black
IF OIL and gas exploration is a business for dreamers and optimists, Sacgasco’s Gary Jeffrey is a prime example of that mindset, trying to get a well drilled in an unloved part of the world because he’s convinced everyone else has missed the obvious.
It could be a fool’s errand, or a one-in-a-million jackpot, and Jeffrey’s money is on the latter.
He says the wild gambles can come off, as Apache Corporation recently found the new Alpine High oil discovery.
Dogma
The junior, which is focused on the Sacramento Basin in California, is, like Apache, challenging the dogma of existing thinking.
Apache drilled in an unloved area of the Delaware Basin, Texas, and has found a potentially massive new unconventional oil and gas discovery, up to five billion barrels and 75 trillion cubic feet, and the Alpine High is now the focus of around 25% of its drilling budget this year.
Jeffery said the shale revolution was driven as much by new ideas and enlightenment as new technology, and people who are willing to challenge the orthodoxy will see “untold” opportunities open up.
“Apache did not find a new rock layer or petroleum deposit, nor did they invent a new technology. Apache was merely willing to question, to conduct experiments to challenge that dogma, and once they were convinced that the old dogma was wrong they scooped up all the available acreage,” he said.
The starting point of any “mad fool crusade” is to understand why some ideas become calcified and critically unchallenged in the first place.
Discovery thinking
It is that thinking that applies to Sacgasco, which has been using “discovery thinking” to develop a large conventional gas play concept that sits in the unloved north of a gas hungry, world-leading economy.
Jeffrey said the Zohr field in Egypt, Johan Sverdrup and Goliat fields in Norway and Gunslinger (240MMbbl) in California were all found targeting new plays near decades-old production, and so new discoveries are clearly possible.
Sacgasco believes the old timers in California skipped focusing on gas exploration in favour of oil, and many still do, despite the fact there are gas shows in the Sacramento Basin and that California consumes seven billion cubic feet per day but needs to import 90% and gas prices as it only generates 400MMcfpd.
Prices are close to $3.40/mcf and there is a prediction of shortages over the next few years, so prices can be hedged out to the end of 2028.
“It’s a hell of a place to be finding world-class gas resources,” he said.
Small field
Sacgasco is one of only 50 operators in the basin, compared to thousands of operators in states such as North Dakota or Texas, and they are dogmatically focused in the nine known producing reservoirs doing little to look deeper, so Sacgasco has little competition.
“We have been told many times that our story of a multi-Tcf gas story is too good to be true, and that we have been smoking, and inhaling, some of the local produce, but no one so far has been able to give us a cogent reason why,” Jeffrey said.
To start its search Sacgasco has gone back to basics, looking at gas flows to surface from the only two wells drilled into the Cretaceous-aged rocks, rocks that have received no attention in almost 40 years.
“Our missing element, as everyone tells us, is that we need a commercial gas flow from a modern well, and to do that we need to drill Dempsey-1,” he said.
Jeffrey believes Sacgasco and partner and stablemate Xstate Resources will be able to find the cash to drill the well before next March, as he says there’s one vital piece of information that supports the gas story.
Clues
Occidental Petroleum spin-off California Resources Corporation last year drilled Tulainyo-1, and while it was reported it as a plugged and abandoned well last year, but buried in its last annual report was proof it intersected multiple, stacked, gas bearing reservoirs in a 50sq.km anticline.
The well was only drilled to 1600m, and based on the offset well, James-1, drilled in the 1960s a few miles away, there was at least 100m thick sand at 1000m.
CRC, like many American oilers, is saddled with $6 billion in debt and has basically stopped drilling.
“Perhaps they didn’t want anyone to know about their result,” Jeffrey mused.
Partner Cirque Resources describes Tulainyo as a structurally-controlled natural gas prospect on a well-defined large anticline similar in size and shape to the 50+ TCF Pinedale Anticline in Wyoming.
Jeffrey said Tulainyo helps support Sacgasco’s Dempsey and Alvarez plans.
Dempsey
Dempsey is a tilted fault block that has potential for over 1Tcf, and it sits where Sacgasco already has existing small-scale production.
The Dempsey-1 will cost less than $4 million, including testing, to appraise the potential for undrained gas in well understood Forbes top and toe sands that have some 5000 well penetrations in the state.
It would then be deepened to explore for the big gas targets in stacked G and X sands down to 3200m.
After testing any gas shows Jeffrey said development could be rapid. If the gas meets pipeline specification it can be hooked into the existing company owned metre station and the gas should start rolling in.
The metering station has existing capacity to measure 20MMcfpd, or more than $20 million in income per annum, and all without fraccing.
Success at Dempsey would lead to drilling an appraisal well on the Alvarez prospect, a separate target with the potential for 2.4Tcf.
It is based around a 1982 oil exploration well that encountered 500m gas shows in the Stoney Creek Sands down 4000m to that were never been logged.
At the same time the company aims to secure additional leases at low costs to capture the upside at costs around $50 per acre, on additional prospects with Xstate and Bombora Natural Resources.
Analogue
Jeffery said California in the 2010s is a lot like Papua New Guinea in the 1970s, and he should know, he was there.
He said the prospective area of the gas play in California’s Tehama Sub-basin is similar in size and structural geology to the PNG fold belt, but exploration is decades behind PNG where trillions of cubic feet of gas have been found in the past few decades.
California has just six well penetrations at depth in the Tehama Sub-basin, and it offers none of the logistical headaches that PNG’s highlands do.
Jeffery said he took inspiration from David Attenborough who said “the whole business of having fun, exploration, and finding new things, makes you want to get up in the morning and learn new things. The world would be terrible if we knew it all.”
Jeffrey said the company was “well down the track” of securing funding for its well.
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