Adriano1The 15% Vicksburg success rate may be "unheard of" or...

Adriano1

The 15% Vicksburg success rate may be "unheard of" or alternatively the only person who has heard it is your "contact". Unusual to treat one person's comments as facts if they do not make sense - talk about setting up a straw man and then knocking it down - one of the more risible tools of debate.

One still awaits the facts about this Woodie-1 well but it is a fact that the Vicksburg is commercial in the Houston embayment and it is a fact that MAD have found large seismic targets in the Vicksburg at Blue Ridge.

A flicker of interest in the US on Friday.

Some Vicksburg comments follow:

In 1995, Edge Petroleum began exploring the mature Vicksburg trend in South Texas with the aid of a specula- tive 3D seismic survey. Our initial exploration campaign focused on drilling untested compartments in the faulted section and met with limited success. In 1997, after the drilling of two seemingly identical structures resulted in a success and a dry hole, we conducted a seismic modeling study that indicated an AVO anomaly should be associated with the pay interval. Based on this prediction, we repro- cessed the 3D data and generated angle stack volumes. Approximately 320 square miles of angle stack volumes were integrated with productive well data and analyzed using seismic interpretation software including visualiza- tion tools. This analysis showed that about half of the commercial wells were associated with AVO anomalies
and about two-thirds of drilled AVO anomalies were productive.
Encouraged by these findings we identified numerous prospective anomalies. In our subsequent exploration pro- gram we drilled nine AVO-supported wildcats resulting in seven commercial successes. A typical discovery encoun- tered a high-quality reservoir with an areal extent closely matched by the associated AVO anomaly. Two of the dis- coveries had stratigraphic trapping components and may not have been identified without the use of AVO. Thus, the AVO tool has allowed us to explore for new gas accumula- tions in a mature trend with a high rate of success.
Note: The full manuscript of our AVO work in the Vicksburg will be published under the title “Developing an Exploration Tool in a Mature Trend: A Class 2 AVO Case Study in South Texas,” in The Leading Edge, v. 17, no. 11.