Jim Redden - Contributing Editor
Van Gogh set to debut
Subsea installation is 85% complete and first oil from the high-profile Van Gogh oilfield in Western Australia’s Exmouth basin is on schedule for 2Q 2009, says operator Apache Corp.
The development is expected to produce 65,000 to 70,000 b/d of oil through an FPSO now under construction at the Keppel Shipyard in Singapore, Tim Wall, regional vice president of Apache’s Australia operations, told investors. Construction of the converted oil tanker, likewise, is 85% complete, he said.
Apache by far is the largest leasehold offshore Australia, with interests in 11.9 million acres. Map courtesy of Apache Corp.
As of early November, all but two of the development wells were completed, Wall said. The Van Gogh program called for nine multi-lateral and one lateral well, including gas and water injectors, through unconsolidated sands.
“Apache has already proven these can be drilled,” an engineer for one of the service companies working on the project said earlier this year. In June 2007, a test of the first horizontal well at Van Gogh flowed 9,694 b/d from the Top Barrow formation. The Theo 3-H well was drilled in 1,205 ft (367 m) of water to 10,598 ft (3,230 m) MD.
Apache, the most prolific operator offshore Australia, also is launching an appraisal program for its Coniston/Novara project immediately north of Van Gogh. Once commercially sanctioned, Coniston/Novara will be added to Van Gogh through a subsea tieback, with 2012 seen as the preliminary start-up of production, Wall said.
“It’s (Coniston/Novara) an accumulation that’s been discovered and tested. The Coniston field has been tested and there is a little snap-on here called Novara that we also will test. We’re going to go in and do some appraisal work early next year and try to figure out how large this is. Once we do that, we’ll figure out what the development plan is, but hopefully we’ll get this thing sanctioned by mid-year next year,” he said.
As the most active offshore operator in Australia, Apache’s 2008 drilling campaign called for 52 wells, including 32 wildcats. “We’re developing gas; we’re developing small targets and big targets. We’re the largest and we drill more wells year in and year out, offshore, than the rest of the (operating) community combined. We’ll drill 40% to 50% of all the offshore wells in a given year,” he said.
The operator kicked off its 2008 campaign with the Brulimar-1 discovery on the Northwest Shelf that encountered 113 ft (34 m) of net pay in the Upper Triassic Mungaroo sandstone. Preliminary plans also call for a two-year drilling campaign in the Gippsland basin, which was to kick off in August. “Hopefully, when I come back next year I’ll be able to say, ‘now we’ve got some great stuff down south of Melbourne in the Gippsland basin that we’re developing’,” Wall told analysts.
EZ does it in GoM
Hughes Christensen says it successfully deployed its patented EZCase casing bit technology in two deepwater subsalt wells in the Gulf of Mexico, reducing the non-productive time (NPT) encountered in offsets where tar and loss circulation zones severely impacted operations.
In the first well in the Green Canyon area in 3,450 ft (1,052 m) of water, a 12 ¼-in. polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) bit on a 10 3/4-in. liner was used to drill through and isolate a challenging subsalt tar zone. Prior to the EZCase bit run, the tar zone had caused the operator to sidetrack a previous well twice. The EZCase bit drilled 464 ft (141 m) in 13.3 hours with an average ROP of 34.9 ft/hr (10.64 m/hr), overcoming the problems associated with the tar zone and allowing the operator to reach TD.
In the second well, also in the Green Canyon area in 4,700 ft (1,432 m) water depth, a 10 5/8-in. PDC bit on a 9 7/8-in. liner drilled through and isolated an unexpected loss circulation zone that earlier caused severe mud losses followed by a stuck pipe event that resulted in a lost BHA and a sidetrack. To prevent another such failure, the EZCase bit was successfully deployed and drilled 149 ft (45 m) at an average ROP of 10 ft/hr, landing the 9 7/8-in. liner below the lower pressured thief zone. An 8 ½-in. PDC bit was used to drill out the 10 5/8-in. EZCase bit and drill ahead to the next casing point successfully.
EZ Case is a premium drilling shoe tool, designed to offer high performance in moderately competent formations, and ideally is suited for drilling-in surface strings and straight hole liner sections. Earlier, Hughes Christensen entered into a cooperative agreement with Tesco to provide the drilling engineering, project management, and field-level delivery of the EZ Case technology. When combined, the Hughes Christensen EZ Case tool and Tesco’s drilling system technology offer a full size and capability spectrum in straight hole applications, for 4 ½-in. through 20-in. casing sizes.
INTEQ releases new telemetry service
Baker Hughes INTEQ has introduced its aXcelerate High-Speed Telemetry service, offering high-speed mud-pulse and wired-pipe data transmission for LWD and MWD applications.
INTEQ claims the aXcelerate service provides the fastest mud-pulse telemetry available, with data rates of 20 bps achieved constantly. This data rate is more than 500% faster than the three bits per second industry standard.
The aXcelerate service also enables wired-pipe telemetry connectivity in conjunction with The IntelliServ Network. INTEQ has provided downhole services in the majority of all wired-pipe work that has been done to date and has worked closely with The IntelliServ Network to pioneer novel, real-time applications that take advantage of the large available bandwidths.
A number of operators have employed the aXcelerate in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, offshore Brazil, the Middle East, and elsewhere. With the cost of drilling operations steadily increasing and margins for error decreasing, more operators are shifting focus to the value of a much clearer downhole picture that is enabled by the aXcelerate service.
