Offshore staff
LONDON – The drillship Maersk Venturer has sailed to Ghana and will start a four-year, multi-well program next month for Tullow Oil and its partners.
It had been working on Tullow’s previous drilling campaign, but the company terminated the contract last year in response to COVID-19’s impact on the oil price.
In 2021, the vessel is due to drill one water injector and two production wells on the Jubilee field and one gas injector well on the TEN field to provide pressure support for two Ntomme oil producers.
These measures should offset near-term production declines, with the next set of wells in 2022 restoring and sustaining production for the long term.
Tullow has taken onboard lessons from the previous program and aims to cut drilling costs by 20% through a combination of simplified well designs, improved rig reliability, and supply chain savings.
Following completion of Jubilee FPSO’s turret remediation project, with installation and commissioning of the CALM buoy and offloading line, the tanker support vessels that have been on contract since 2016 have been released. Tullow and its partners are assessing options for a potential second loading line.
Last year, Jubilee production field averaged 83,600 b/d and TEN 48,700 b/d, helped by increased gas offtake nominations from the government, approval from the Ministry of Energy to increase flaring, uptime of over 95% at both FPSOs, and improved well optimization and water injection (now above 200,000 b/d) on the Jubilee floater.
Sustained water injection supports reservoir pressure and improves overall sweep efficiency, Tullow pointed out. Over the next three years, the partners plan to raise Jubilee’s gas handling capacity and perform process modifications on TEN, with a view to eliminating routine flaring in Ghana by 2025.
Offshore Mauritania, Tullow expects decommissioning operations on its offshore Band and Tiof field licenses to start in 4Q.
The cost of the overall Mauritania decommissioning program, including the Chinguetti field facilities, looks set to rise by around $30 million over the next two years, the company added, due to the impact of COVID and a new requirement for increased levels of seabed clearance.
03/11/2021
