water based drilling mud, page-8

verysensiblemike,

As much as this was to be a conventional oil well it still needed to be fracced, so any oil shows would have been only that. There was never going to be bubbling crude erupting from the ground.

It was not as simple as drilling a hole and oil comes out.

My understanding is, whether they used water or oil based drilling muds would not have mattered in this instance, as any drilling muds are a known entity in the drilling process by pumping them out they can remove them from any formation sampling. From the announcement,

"Provisional wireline results indicate low oil saturations in the Nanushuk Topsets not conducive to successfully flowing the formation, as borne out by the MDT sampling results, which did not retrieve hydrocarbon samples. Reservoir properties appear to be compromised by dispersed clay in the matrix at Winx-1. This clay is often present in other successful Nanushuk wells but in discrete laminations with decent quality, high resistivity, oil saturated sandstones in between. The dispersed clay in the Nanushuk at Winx impacts both fluid mobility and oil saturations. The clay serves to bind much of the fluid present in place so it cannot flow. It also occupies pore space within the formation,
resulting in a lower relative hydrocarbon saturation. This means that, whilst oil is present in the reservoir, there is less of it and it is not mobile. Further evaluation will be undertaken post drill to fully understand the implications of the petrophysical results."

They have clearly done a range of resistivity testing away from the borehole across the Nanushuk and Torok zones, what they found was not clay laminations, as in layers, just a zone of clay holding some suspended oil.

This area on the pinch out was the unknown, as previous drilling by Armstrong/OSH at about this latitude were done on the centre of the fairway.

Also they knew they would encounter clay in the Nanushuk formation as other wells have also, do you know from the Operator what type of drilling muds were used? Have they explained to you why? Where have you seen the rig is still in site?

Has the Operator given you answers to these questions, as you seen to be in the know?

Cheers