Offshore staff
LONDON – Talos Energy, Premier Oil, and Sierra Oil & Gas are in talks with PEMEX on appraisal drilling of last year’s Zama oil discovery in the Sureste basin offshore Mexico.
The Zama-1 well in block 7 encountered a continuous oil-bearing interval of more than 335 m (1,100 ft) with up to 200 m (656 ft) of net oil-bearing reservoir in upper Miocene sandstones with no water contact.
Premier estimates 1.2-1.8 Bbbl in-place, with recoverable resources in the range of 400-800 MMbbl. This includes volumes that potentially extend into a neighboring block operated by PEMEX.
The discussions concern a pre-unitization agreement to progress the appraisal program, set to start later this year or in early 2019 on block 7.
The partners are negotiating an option for a rig for this purpose, while PEMEX has indicated that it intends to appraise the Zama structure on its license via a well this spring.
In addition, seven vendors have submitted pre-front-end engineering design (pre-FEED) scoping studies to assist appraisal planning and to identify additional data that needs to be acquired in the drilling programs.
Premier also has a carried 10% interest in offshore block 2, extendable to 25%. Here the partners are assessing which prospect should be drilled first, probably in 2019.
Offshore Brazil, Premier has interpreted the final processed broadband seismic data across all three of its Ceará basin blocks and identified the best prospects.
Planning is now under way for a potential drilling campaign in 2019 or 2020, with good progress on securing environmental and drilling permits.
Across the Atlantic, Premier is a partner to Petronas in the deepwaterChinguetti field off Mauritania, where production was recently shut down for good.
The FPSO is being prepared for sail away and a drillship has mobilized to the field to start a six-month campaign of temporary suspension of the wells, starting with the water injectors. Permanent abandonment of the wells should follow in 2019 (government approval is still pending for the field abandonment and decommissioning plan).
In addition, Premier and its partners are drawing up a program to abandon suspended exploration and appraisal wells on the previously relinquished offshore Banda and Tiof discoveries.
03/09/2018
