With appologies to 'Geo' if appropriate. I trust I will not offend you by copying your recent excellent technial anlaysis on TRP/LSE here. Given it's quality, I think GBP owners are likely to benefit from it.
This could be a long/multiple post. As the market is now closed and I am unlikely to influence anyones hold/sell position I will post my view of WHAT might.. MIGHT be going on here.
OK... so we know basement came in early. Basement is rock that is hard and difficult to drill through. The rock sniffers pretty well know what this is as they go out on field trips looking at outcrops in the area and can see where the sediment layers are in sequence, and where they stop and turn into something like Granite. The chat over on iii is a bit pathetic with people screaming for them to drill on - you can, but ROP [rate of penetration] is hopeless and you wear out very expensive bits like confetti... you also need a very powerful Rig. There are Granite [fractured reservoirs] here in the UK [Cairngorm] and in South America but they are exceedingly rare and tend to be difficult to produce.. [its all about dual permiability systems... blah-blah] . Anyway, the target was never the basement, the sedimentary layers above are where the hydrocarbons can be trapped.
These sediments are exceptionally shallow, places like Baku have wells like these but this is a very different regime. The nearest comparible reservoirs I know of are the N.Sea Eocenes, a goood example of which is Alba, others are Shelley, Pict, Gryphon, Harding etc, but Alba is a good "offset". These fields are deeper in the N. Sea but the thermal profile/history is probably similar.
Alba is a case where the oil is not discrete, it does not float as a layer of clean dry oil on top of a underlying water aquifer, it is emulsion, a mixture of oil & water which varies against depth. In these cases, the "transition zone" where oil separates from water can be very thick, indeed it can be effect the whole reservoir section, 5% water at the top and 5% oil at the bottom. This makes log interpretation very difficult as there is no black and white oil/water contact, just shades of gray.
So why am I predicting this? we know that the area was demonstrating seeps, these can often be unrelated to the actual reservoir but where they are it means that the reservoir will only hold gradient pressure, any excess pressure in the reservoir will have simply leaked away, the gas is able to escape more easily, so what is left is a dead tank of low pressure oil/water emulsion.
This is unlikely to be capable of flowing to surface under its own drive as there is little stored pressure. However, this still could be a huge "tank" of oil that you simply have to pump out, the Elephant field in Libya is such a case. Of equall importance here is the Wax, we know from the other wells in the area that the oil is waxy, when this is mixed with oil and water it can form what is termed "untreatable emulsion", unless the temperature is high enough/elevated, the wax crystals form a gel emulsion which is thick and awkward. The key to testing a well is to pick good clean sand with high oil saturation and low water, well above the water zone so that you dont "cone" water under draw-down as you produce at higher rate. The big reason for not wanting water is that it is heavier than oil, that produces a higher hydrostatic pressure which reduces the flowrate. On top of that, a DST is not equiped to deal with large volumes of water, especially if its tight emulsion which is hard to treat. I think this is why logging/sampling will take a long time. If they are running MDT or an anologue tool, they have to hover at each pressure point for 20-30 minutes minimum, they have to pump through the tool to clear away any mud filtrate invasion and get a good resistivity or spectrometer output that is stable to determine what the fluid is/or is likely to be. At certain points they may need to take numerous mdt chambers to get samples[which have to be brought back to surface, removed and "flashed" down so they PHYSICALLY see what fluid they are looking at for each depth.
All the panic has been JUST THAT, this is all normal and the jitters have taken hold of a lot of the PI's especially ones over-exposed here. All of what has been happening here is perfectly normal for an end-of-well scenario. None of this means that there IS or is DEFINATELY NOT a reservoir there, but it does explain where the difficulties may be. Either way, normal end-of-well logging will always take circa 48hrs, which puts us through to Saturday. With any luck Tower now know what type of fluid they are looking at, the next stage will either be abandonment... which means there is nothing commercial there or they will case the hole. If they run casing, I think they will be planning to DST [test the well] flowing it to surface. But.. there may be complications here. In the scenario I have speculated here, they may go on to Sambia before they test Iti-1 as they may need to bring in additional equipment to Uganda to be able to test the well. They may need ESP, they may need additional separation capacity for the water, they may need some way of handling very nasty produced water in large volumes, they may even need to screen some demulsifiers with real oil to be able to get good oil/water separation.
So.. my view is that there is likely to be a reservoir as I don’t see them paying out for a lot of logging if its a dog. I think there may well be technical issues which may delay testing [DST], the log interpretation may well be challenging.. which is why it's taking some time. But, IMHO/DYOR, there is no reason why a positive announcement will not arise during the start of the week. The "were all doomed Mr Mannering" panic's over on iii are without foundation and there is still a good chance of a change in the SP's fortunes next week.
IMHO/DYOR, hope this may be of some use to someone.. BOL – Geo
GBP Price at posting:
16.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
