All posts tagged Oil Patch Sub-Sahara

Invictus Energy is working ahead preparing to kick off a two dimensional (2D) seismic campaign at the Cabora Bassa Project in May 2023

. “The campaign will be aimed at maturing multiple leads (Mopane, Musuma, Machabel and Mahogany) along the proven play on trend to the east of Mukuyu and additional leads along the highly prospective Basin Margin play (Mimosa and Mukwa),

These leads, previously identified on reprocessed vintage seismic data, can be converted to drillable prospects in the course of the interpretation.

Invictus says that drilling of Mukuyu-2, the first well in the Mukuyu appraisal programme,  remains in line with prior guidance, with an anticipated spud date early in the third quarter of 2023,  targeting multiple hydrocarbon (gas-condensate and potentially light oil) bearing intervals encountered in the Mukuyu-1/ST1 well in the Upper Angwa, Pebbly Arkose and Post Dande formations.

The appraisal well will also aim to test the Post Dande horizon away from the major east-west fault on the southern flank and the deeper potential in the remaining Upper Angwa formation, which was not encountered in the Mukuyu-1/ST1 campaign due to it being thicker than predrill estimates, providing further upside potential.

The Mukuyu-1/ST1 well encountered gas pay to total depth, interpreted from wireline logs and fluorescence in multiple reservoirs throughout the 1,500-metre interval penetrated in the Pebbly Arkose and Upper Angwa.

“The well design for Mukuyu-2 will incorporate valuable experience gained from the drilling of the successful Mukuyu-1/ST1 exploration well to improve drilling efficiency and lowering operational risks”, the company notes. “The maintenance and upgrade programme for Exalo’s Rig 202  has commenced and will be completed prior to the rig move and spud of Mukuyu-2”.

The TGS-Petrodata joint venture has received the approval of the Nigerian authorities to commence a $55Million three-dimensional (3D) ‘carpet’, multi-client seismic survey in the deepwater Niger Delta.

It’s an ambitious project which has benefitted from industry prefunding.

Chevron’s pre-funding of the project with $28Million is a bet on Nigeria’s deepwater future, say spokesmen for TGS and Petrodata.

Some other international operators have indicated interest in acquiring the data after production, but they will not get the benefit of the discount that Chevron is getting for pre-funding.

The first and second phases of the data acquisition are 5,500 square kilometres, each in areal size. China Oilfield Services Limited (COSL), a majority owned subsidiary of Chinese state-owned company China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) Group, will provide a Chinese made acquisition vessel. “The proposed acquisition will have significant offset, with 10kilometre long streamers”., the operators’ spokespersons say.

Italian contractor Saipem has been awarded a drilling contract worth $400Million “by the Joint Venture Eni Côte d’Ivoire Ltd. and (state hydrocarbon firm) Petroci“, offshore Côte d’Ivoire.

The company didn’t reveal how many wells the contract will cover. The Baleine field, discovered in 2021, is located in 1,150metre water depth in the West African Transform Margin.

“This value ($400Million) is to be considered gross of the leasing costs of the Deep Value Driller vessel that will be used for the operations”, Saipem discloses.

What that simply means is that the seventh-generation drillship Deep Value Driller is specifically named in the contract. The rig is not originally Saipem’s; it was chartered as part of the agreement with the Norwegian company named Deep Value Driller.

Saipem has described Deep Value Driller, as “one of the most modern in the world”.

Saipem’s 12000 Drillship was used to drill the Baleine 1 discovery well.

Outside of drilling services, the contractor had earlier won engineering and procurement contracts worth about 1Billion Euros, for track development of the Baleine field, including:

• Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Installation (EPCI) activities of Subsea Umbilicals, Risers and Flowlines (SURF) and of an onshore gas pipeline for the connection to the distribution grid.
• The offshore laying of flexible lines, risers and umbilicals will be executed by Saipem’s flagship vessel FDS2 and the development of the project will be on a fast-track basis.
• Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Commissioning activities regarding the refurbishment of the Firenze FPSO vessel, plus 10 years of Operations and Maintenance services of the vessel.

The latest (drilling contract) award, Saipem says, “represents an important consolidation of Saipem’s presence in the Ivory Coast, a strategic area where the company is currently executing the project for the development of the oil and gas field Baleine.”

Matpatson Petroleum Services is a well engineering and drilling equipment procurement firm, fully engaged in turnkey drilling and associated services. It concluded drilling two wells back-to-back, barely a month ago, on the Ebendo field onshore Western Niger Delta for Energia Petroleum, the Nigerian marginal Field operator. OLUBUKOLA OKULAJA AND OLUMIDE ILESANMI, Matpatson’s Managing Director and General Manager Engineering & Project respectively… spoke with Africa Oil+Gas Report on the growing appetite for turnkey drilling services in the country, focusing on the value of delivering wells on time and on budget. Excerpts:

Africa Oil+Gas Report: Congratulations on delivering two wells back-to-back on Ebendo. There was so much excitement in …

Matpastson: We have done one exploration and one appraisal/development well back-to-back; all on turnkey, for Energia Petroleum, on their Ebendo field in Oil Mining Lease (OML 56).

The idea for contracting well drilling on a turnkey basis is not totally new in the industry, but if you remember, the operator provided everything apart from the actual making of the hole. However, we have gone beyond that, we drill the well and we provide everything. We also provide other services like open-hole logging, for which we make arrangement with other contractors. Basically, the client gives us the coordinates, we design the well and they agree with the design, we also write the programme and they agree with the programme and then we go to execute.

Raring to go: :”We have tubings, we have casing accessories, we have well heads and we have completion accessories all in our warehouse in Port Harcourt”.

So you are their drilling department in a sense.

Yes and they only have somebody that oversees what we are doing to ensure that it is in line with what we have agreed on. We didn’t just wake up and got there as Matpatson. We have a mission and a vision statement which was written in 2007.

We’d get to your mission statement. The Ebendo story sounds exciting…

Energia was actually going to drill in 2022 and they put out a tender for a rig and we approached them and said why don’t you just give us this job to do and we’d provide all the services.

So for turnkey you also actually have to provide the rig?

Yes you have to provide the rig and everything else. We did all the negotiations and they asked if we had everything and we said yes, they could come visit our warehouse here in Lagos. If they wanted to see some of the completion accessories, then they could come to our warehouse in Port Harcourt. Although we did two wells in this project, we have the capacity to do five wells back to back.  if we get a contract today, we don’t need to order anything. We have tubing, we have casing accessories, we have well heads and we have completion accessories all in our warehouse in Port Harcourt. We also have a pipe yard here in Lagos because at a point, it was actually easy to move stuff from here to the Warri zone rather than go from Port Harcourt because of the bad road. We still have pipes for about four wells here and five in Port Harcourt, tubing and casing..

You carried out e-logging on the wells too…and did the completion job?

Yes, we bring in top service companies, supervised by ranking Subject Matter Experts, for the e-logging and we pay them for that service. We actually have a contract with them for such services. But we complete the wells …

It is full oil field servicethat you do then.

Totally correct. Everything is on you; the risk is on you and the benefit is on you as the turnkey contractor. So that is like transferring the entire risk to you and you accept that. If you do your job very well and you have competent people, you are probably not taking too much risk and that is the difference between us and others.

Olumide Ilesanmi, General Manager Engineering & Projects

If you did the completion for them you should also know what their current production is.

Well, they haven’t actually run their flow line but off the record, their production is slightly over double.

How much more than 5,000BOPD?

More than that when they open up. They were so impressed with the way we drilled the well and its performance. The first well was the exploration well, Ebendo North. We actually asked them for permission to use these names in publications and they said we can.

Olubukola Okulaja, Managing Director

We did the job and we handed over the wells to them on the 31^st of December, 2022. I think people have a totally different idea of turnkey even though turnkey is not new to the industry. But the Matpatson approach to turnkey is new. The old approach to turnkey: The operator appoints a company to drill a section of the hole. The contractor mentions its cost and it is paid and it drills, but the operator runs the casing and the cement (using other contractors). The drilling contractor is now asked to drill the second section hole for a number of days as well and that was the whole idea of what turnkey was. The competencies were largely retained with the operator but today, the competencies are with us (the drilling contractor, outside the Operator’s system). If you don’t have anybody at all, you can hire a consultant to take a look at what we do, we have all the competencies; not just the drilling competences. What we have done which is different is that for every critical item, we have a subject matter expert. Drilling of course comes under our umbrella. The project manager on the Ebendo work was Olumide Ilesanmi here, our General Manager, Engineering & Projects. He managed everything.

Regarding specialist subject matter experts we have, for open hole wireline, someone who had worked for Schlumberger before for 25 years. For well testing, we have somebody who has worked for Halliburton for like 20 years who is our SME. For mud engineering, we have someone like Dr. Victor Maduka. These people oversee those critical items while the rest are drilling supervisors. If your programme is properly written and the well is properly engineered, those guys are able to carry out the instructions very well. We have performed and done very well.

We have talked about SMEs but what about the people below them? What Matpatson has done is typically to pick up some of our engineers and drilling supervisors from NYSC and train them up. Do you know that Matpatson has a training school?

-TO BE CONCLUDED.

The full interview is published in the January/February 2023 edition of Africa Oil+Gas Report, which will be distributed to participants at the Sub-Saharan Africa International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (SAIPEC) scheduled for February 14-16 2023 at the Eko Convention Centre in Lagos, Nigeria. It will subsequently be published on this website.

China National Offshore Operating Company CNOOC, the Chinese state-owned E&P behemoth, has commenced a wildcat, as scheduled, in deepwaters offshore Gabon.

Tigre-1 is one of six frontier probes listed by analysts as possible basin opening wells in Africa.

The well is being drilled by the mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU) Stena Icemax in blocks BC-9 and BCD-10. The latter was where Shell encountered 200 metres of net gas pay while drilling the Leopard-1 wildcat in 2014. Shell was excited by the result at the time and there were speculations (that Shell did not refute), of potential resource of 10Trillion cubic feet of gas in the Leopard structure, which is located below a salt (carbonate) formation.

Shell has since divested from the asset,as Gabon’s fiscal terms as of then did not allow for commercialization of natural.  CNOOC Ltd, its partner in the 2014 discovery, took over 100% and operatorship of both assets in an acquisition finalized in 2019. CNOOC’s ongoing drilling is targeting oil, downslope of Shell’s Leopard 1.

The drilling programme is crucial for Gabon, which has struggled, in vain for the last 30 years, to find itself in the deepwater production map of the world. It is the only African oil producing country, lying on the edge of the south Atlantic, without crude oil or gas output from the deepwater terrain.