Offshore staff
TORONTO, Canada — The semisub Island Innovator has spud the Gazania-1 exploration well in Block 2B offshore South Africa for operator Eco Atlantic and its partners.
The drilling location is 25 km offshore the Northern Cape in the Orange Basin in 150 m of water. Gazania-1 will be drilled to a depth of about 2,800 m through a multi-zone pay section 7 km updip of Soekor’s 1988 AJ-1 discovery well on the same acreage.
This flowed 191 bbl/d of light, sweet crude to the surface and proved about 50 MMbbl of contingent resources.
Gazania-1 is targeting more than 300 MMbbl of light oil. Pending a discovery in the vertical section, the partners have an option to directionally drill a second sidetrack well from the main wellbore.
Both the vertical well and the sidetrack optional well will be logged and plugged back to surface, with the casing cut off below surface.
Block 2B is in a similar syn-rift basin to TotalEnergies and Shell’s oil and gas discoveries earlier this year offshore Namibia. The partners have identified prospectivity over the entire A-J graben area from 686 sq km of 3D seismic data acquired in 2013.
Other partners are Africa Energy, Panoro Energy and Crown Energy.
10.04.2022
