“Although we had only minor shows, which I am not prepared to put a numerical value on, we are encouraged enough by these results to suspend the well so we can go back and have another look at a later date,” ECA business development vice president Denny McGowan told PetroleumNews.net from Denver this morning.
“We have plenty of time regarding fulfilling our work program obligations and we are learning as we go. We know from the logs, the cores taken, and the flow testing that there is gas present. We have to determine how to proceed from here – hopefully at some point we will have a commercial discovery.”
McGowan said it would take several months to evaluate all the data gathered from the well. He was pretty sure the next step would be shooting some 3D seismic over part of the licence PEP 38346 in preparation for a second well that could investigate other reservoir sands.
ECA, which operates as Westech Energy in New Zealand, drilled the shallow Waitahora well earlier this year. The well found several encouraging signs, including high reservoir pressures, in reservoir-quality rocks over a 70m interval from 1180-1250m measured depth, while drilling down to the 1352m target depth.
Waitahora-1 is a direct offset to the Kauhauroa-1 wildcat well that in the late 1990s, on an extended production flow test, gauged over 11 million cubic feet per day (MMcfd) of gas and over 70MMcfd during open-flow testing from the Kauhauroa limestones, an early Miocene-aged reservoir.
McGowan added Westech was also going ahead with plans to drill the Albacore-1 wildcat well in offshore Taranaki licence PEP 38491 as soon as a suitable rig became available.
There was no opportunity for ECA to grab the Ocean Patriot before it headed back to Australia now that Tui operator Australian Worldwide Exploration planned the additional exploratory well, Kopuwai-1 in licence PEP 38482, after completing the Tui development wells and the Taranui, Hector and West Cape exploration wells.
“We have a drilling location for Albacore but no rig, and the water is too deep to utilise a jack-up such as the Ensco 107 that is due to start the Kupe development wells in September,” said McGowan.
He added that though the June work program commitment to the well had passed, he was confident Crown Minerals would take account of the worldwide shortage of rigs and allow a time extension to spud Albacore.
Earlier this year Westech took over as operator of PEP 38491 from Houston-headquartered Transworld Exploration and Production. Recent farminee, government-owned Mighty River Power, and Westech bought out Transworld and New Zealand private company Bridge Petroleum. Westech now held 33.33% equity and MRP 66.67%.
